Best setting for high point raid 0, used for video captures?

[ofbarea]

Hi,

I just upgraded my PC. It went from an ASUS TUV4x (Via Apollo Pro 133T – 1.2 PIII-S) with a Promise Fast Track 66 to a Soyo P4I fire dragon (Intel 845D – 1.8 P4) with a High Point ultra 133 array controller.

In the Promise controller I had a couple of 30GB Maxtor disk configured in Raid 0 configured as a Video Capture device. This setting worked great. I never lost a frame with it.

But now, I configured the same disks in the High Point controller, but when doing captures to this disk I’m loosing frames.

This array is configured with 64K blocks for the stripe.

In this faster machine I can render DivX and VCDs faster, but I no longer have reliable captures.

I think this is related to the sector size configured for High Point array. Does anyone know what the best block size for this array controller is, in order to achieve the best performance for Video Capture?



Thanks

[kenminator]

I am not familiar with RAID device on PC's. Coming from *nix world, I am cuirous to know how much of a different a RAID 0 with 2 drives could have made? Compared to a plain old disk? Both drive on the same controller? Same channel?

Typically on the system that I setup, a stripping RAID should have mulitiple controller/chanel(>5 drives, I'd say.) The strip size is determined by the average IO size divided by number of drive in the RAID to achieve optimal performance. So that each "write" can be evenly distributed by every drive(and/or controller) in the RAID setup. I assume video capture happens continously; then one need to ask, is there any buffer in the OS? Does it fill up the buffer first before commiting to hard drive? If that's the case, you can divide the buffer size by number of drive you have in the RAID and figure out a good strip size. Just some suggestions. Hope it helps.

[Jester700]

Search the article archives at anandtech & tom's hardware. I remember one of them testing the difference in cluster size in various apps.

I assume you're capping in something other than DV or MPEG to warrant the RAID?