Building a Graphics Workstation: Hard Drives Tests: WD in RAID 0
June 17, 2008
The two Western Digital Caviar WD6400AAKS 640GB SATA hard drives were then set up in RAID 0 via Intel ICH9R SATA controller in BIOS:
The average transfer rate of 166 MB/s looks quite good and the access time did not change significantly.
Boot Times
The OS drive with Windows XP on it was then cloned to WD RAID 0 volume and measured how long it took to boot (test included displaying booting option of /3GB switch for 10 s). Average booting times of 2 measurements:
Drive |
Controller |
Booting Time |
|---|---|---|
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA ST3320613AS 320 GB |
Gigabyte SATA in IDE |
52 s |
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA ST3320613AS 320 GB |
Gigabyte SATA in AHCI |
51 s |
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA ST3320613AS 320 GB |
Intel ICH9R SATA in RAID mode |
50 s |
Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB SATA x 2 in RAID 0 |
Intel ICH9R SATA in RAID mode |
63 s |
As you can see RAID 0 did not seem to improve booting speed. And Seagate Barracuda with OS on it could be plugged to any SATA controller in any mode resulting in the same booting times.
Seagate hard drive with OS was left plugged in Intel ICH9R controller.Two Western Digital hard drives in RAID 0 are used for storage of photographs. RAID 0, of course, requires at least daily backups.