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Enter The Matrix: Slice out and get the best part from your hard drives

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Well it looks like it is time to buy a new MB and 2 more hard drives. Sure be sweet if it works. 6 drive RAID-0 & RAID-10. That would be way run. I know a guy with money that wants a huge storage server to store movies for a Home Theater setup. ICH9R and 6 1TB drives on Raid 5 would be a pretty fun experiment.
 
Nostromo5 said:
Sorry to reply again here but i noticed that..

My max appears to be 750mbs (approx)
and the latest matrix software is version 7.5.0 Hmmm :)

Also my CPU usage used to be more like 12%-15%

I wonder if I have a bad stick of ram on one of the cards..

Ok, Ill shush now..

Nostromo5


No whatever you do don't shush. Keep us posted.
 
hyperasus said:
No whatever you do don't shush. Keep us posted.

Yeah man... stay with us here... we're related lol (reminds me of two tribes after a split and they re-join after years apart, and one is way more advanced than the other... anyways)...

Hyper... I built a server up a while back with a 12 SATA port raid card and a bunch of 250Gb drives. I see they now do SATA2 (mine was a 3Ware) so there's potential to go with a dozen 320's, or whatever size you like. Whicever way you go... it sounds like a great project.

Back to the iRams... I know nothing about 'daughter' boards, but wonder (as it's only a power thing I think) whethera couple of those might work?


Nostro... I think it's time for a picture or two mate.
 
fritzman said:
Yeah man... stay with us here... we're related lol (reminds me of two tribes after a split and they re-join after years apart, and one is way more advanced than the other... anyways)...

lol


Hyper... I built a server up a while back with a 12 SATA port raid card and a bunch of 250Gb drives. I see they now do SATA2 (mine was a 3Ware) so there's potential to go with a dozen 320's, or whatever size you like. Whicever way you go... it sounds like a great project.

I remember loading up an older nforce board with like 4 drives, then added
a scsi card with 3 10k drives, did like a 7 drive raid (software raid).
crazy :)

Back to the iRams... I know nothing about 'daughter' boards, but wonder (as it's only a power thing I think) whethera couple of those might work?


Nostro... I think it's time for a picture or two mate.

I will post some pics tomorrow hopefully, busy weekend..

I'll do a raid 5 and raid 10 see how they work too..

Nostromo5
 
Nice. This is really neat to get the chance to find out what the actual onboard RAID controllers limits are. I'm just so excited that 6 drive RAID actually works. I hope it works with RAID 10 as well.
 
Raid 5 works fine...
 

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Thanks for sharing, that pic of 6 iRams looks neat ! :thup:

Just scratching my head here on where to find a casing that can fit those mobos ! :p
 
Nostro... that is amazing! Thanks for the pic & benchmarks.

I wonder whether it would take much for one of the motherbboard companies to come up with something like an external raid box, that had 6 of these puppies in.

Looks like you are right about the max bandwidth of the ICH9R being around 750mb/s. Doesn't seem like the type of raid you run drops that at all, so it makes me wonder what the max delivery of the setup is once that hurdle is overcome. Irrespective, it must be hellovasnappy doing just about anything.
 
Gigabyte I think is going to be releasing a new version of the i-ram, but it will not be a card, it will be a little box that will fit in a drive bay in your case,
will require a molex for power, and you will just run a sata cable from it to your board, It will also be SATA 300 compatible. So in theory you would only need 3 of them to max out the ICH9 (if in fact it's maxxed out, and not something else we havent thought of), Also it will use DDR2 ram and support ECC ram. Also I think each one will support 8 gigs of ram instead of the current 4.. with the bay version all of it would fit in one place :)

There are other bay versions from other companies available I think, but they are REALLY expensive I think..

Nostromo5
 
Nostromo5 said:
Gigabyte I think is going to be releasing a new version of the i-ram, but it will not be a card, it will be a little box that will fit in a drive bay in your case,
will require a molex for power, and you will just run a sata cable from it to your board, It will also be SATA 300 compatible. So in theory you would only need 3 of them to max out the ICH9 (if in fact it's maxxed out, and not something else we havent thought of), Also it will use DDR2 ram and support ECC ram. Also I think each one will support 8 gigs of ram instead of the current 4.. with the bay version all of it would fit in one place :)

There are other bay versions from other companies available I think, but they are REALLY expensive I think..

Nostromo5


WOW!!! Sounds amazing.

I'm sure bing will be into those
 
I'm sure we all would if the price was about 100th of what they are now. A 16gb RAM drive would be one hell of Windows boot drive.
 
Nostromo5 said:
Thanks :)

I use 2 old mb's with 3 cards each, each with it's own Power supply.
No cpu's or mem, and just power them up, run the cables through the case to the sata ports...

Nostromo5
omg i never thought of that... great idea... i'm not gonna do it, but that's NEAT!

i haven't talked about i-ram since they first came out... is ONE of them faster than 2x raptors in raid0? isn't 6 of them overkill, or even 4 of them overkill?

describe how much ram you have on each card, please... it looks like you have 3 on some and 2 on some others... i guess you can mix and match... say 2x256+512 on one, and 2x512 on another, or something along those lines...
 
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g0dM@n said:
i haven't talked about i-ram since they first came out... is ONE of them faster than 2x raptors in raid0? isn't 6 of them overkill, or even 4 of them overkill?

Mechanical drive can never beat solid state drives like iRam, so does Raptors ! :)

Just watch his avg. seek time, almost 0 (zero) ms ! Its really pwn Raptor ! :D

Well, look at the bright side, Nostromo had show us what is the max internal bandwidth of ICHxR chip.
I believe his result is the 1st in the world that ever published in the public. :thup: :clap:
 
bing said:
Mechanical drive can never beat solid state drives like iRam, so does Raptors ! :)

Just watch his avg. seek time, almost 0 (zero) ms ! Its really pwn Raptor ! :D

Well, look at the bright side, Nostromo had show us what is the max internal bandwidth of ICHxR chip.
I believe his result is the 1st in the world that ever published in the public. :thup: :clap:
Did he do benchmarks of 4 i-rams vs 6 i-rams?

I wonder if DDR ram speed affects the performance of the i-ram... it's cool stuff nevertheless.
 
bing said:
Nostromo had show us what is the max internal bandwidth of ICHxR chip.

I believe his result is the 1st in the world that ever published in the public. :thup: :clap:

... and it all happened right here at OCForums!!!
 
Hey again.

Right now I am running 15 gigs total on the 6 cards..
You are right, you can mix different size ram sticks on the cards, I have mixed 1 gig and 512 sticks, but havent tried any 256's..

Right now I have 2 cards with 2x1gig and 1x512 each, and the other 4 have
1 gig stick + 3 512's each so 6x2.5 total..
The sticks are
2x1 gig OCZ XTC gold
4x1 gig Kingston's
2x1 gig pny's
4x512's mushkin redline's
6x512's patriot xblk's TCCD
2x512's patriot LLK stuff.
2x512's corsair (550) mhz stuff

As you can see quite a range of speeds from pc 2100 to the corsair I think is 4400 and the i-rams seem to handle it well..

BTW I did some more testing with stripe size, and it seems My max may not be controllers max, performance scaled all the way from 4k stripe to 128k.
So I think my max is stripe based, and no way to go past 128k right? is there any kind of hack or something? :)
Ill do a 4 i-ram and a 6 i-ram test..

BTW- the reason I added more i-rams from the original 2 I had was to increase my space, as I had a lot of 512 sticks, but only a pair of 1 gig's at the time, and they were running my rig :) although I admit going from 4-6 for the p5k was curiosity of what speed I would get :)

Nostromo5
 
Nostromo5 said:
although I admit going from 4-6 for the p5k was curiosity of what speed I would get :)

Nostromo5
Yeah that's why I asked... figured it wouldn't have been noticed.

So, when you start a game does it just start RIGHT up? I mean... I can't even IMAGINE what that's like!!!!! lol

Also, I'm curious if 2100 sticks would be just as fast... I'm wondering if the increased ram speed actually affects the i-ram much... I know it says it supports 266/333/400, so I'm sure your 550 sticks and XTC Gold and whatnot are just overkill and don't serve their real (high-speed) purpose.

I say this b/c I wouldn't mind setting up 4 i-rams myself with 4x512mb 2100 sticks on each... I figure that would give me 8 gigs total, and I know 512mb 2100 sticks would be SUPER cheap!!

Too bad there is no ddr2 i-ram... since ddr2 is so damn cheap when it comes to 512mb sticks!!
 
I am pretty sure the i-ram runs any ram you put on it at DDR 2100 speeds
for compatibility reasons. the only reasons I have the higher end sticks on it is because I had them already.. :)

As for loading speeds, yes, I notice a difference, been running GRAW2 demo, oblivion and BF2142 and switch back and forth between I-ram and hard drive and you can tell, where you can REALLY tell is if you run windows from them.
I think I saw half a bar load, then desktop appeared.. I am gonna see if i can load vista on it...

Nostromo5
 
ST3250410AS testing

80g 2 drive raid 0 128k stripe size from 250G ST3250410AS drive testing.
 

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