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

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That's very cool mate... well done.

The whole Boot from C or D idea with the same image is wicked. Can't wait to see your total success!
 
See ! I knew it, JDany3D is a kungfu master !

... Re- subscribed... my own thread ! LOL

Very nice discovery on that boot sector ! :thup:

That will be very useful for future reference, especially for brute force recovery process ! Again, really great discovery !
Thanks for sharing it here ! :clap:

Eagerly waiting for your experience in alternative booting scenario in drive disaster !
 
Hi guys,

bing said:
See ! I knew it, JDany3D is a kungfu master !
!
Don't say that. You are embarrassing me....:burn:

bing said:
... Re- subscribed... my own thread ! LOL
hahahahah

bing said:
Very nice discovery on that boot sector !

That will be very useful for future reference, especially for brute force recovery process ! Again, really great discovery !
Thanks for sharing it here !
It's a pleasure sharing with you both and the others my work. :beer:
I learned a lot reading this thread from the beginning to the end.
The least thing i can do is sharing my experience and showing my gratitude for you all.

bing said:
Eagerly waiting for your experience in alternative booting scenario in drive disaster !

bing said:
That's very cool mate... well done.

The whole Boot from C or D idea with the same image is wicked. Can't wait to see your total success!
Thanks again.
Here we are and i'm ready.

Just a digression on what i did the last night.
I was not completely satisfied about volume 0 + 5 size so i deleted them both and recreated them with 300 GB raid 0 and the rest on raid 5.
I enlarged the raid 0 in order to fit the scratch audio/video partition in it.

Booted from my Hitachi HD (i don't like waiting BartPE booting time (4 minutes)), i created two primary (active partitions one on raid 0 and one on raid 5 and restored on both them the previously saved backup of Win XP.
Tried a reboot from raid 0 goes well.
Detached the first HD from ICH9R and restarted the PC.
Raid 0 disappeared (failure), raid 5 is in degraded state but still booting from primary. Up to now, nothing new.
A this point i was exactly in the same situation i described in my previous post, but with a different raid volume sizes.

Do you remember my issue booting from raid 5, with a very long startup time waiting for a driver to start?
Well, it disappeared.
Maybe there was something wrong in the previous win configuration on raid 5.
The difference between the last win configuration and the previous one was having swap and temp on separate partition in the former, while in the latter it's all (system, swap and temp files) contained into a single partition as windows default.
Of course throwing away the raid 0 containing the temp partition, but still having windows on raid 5 looking for this partition, caused probably some trouble.

Resetting the windows standard configuration on raid 5 having the temp and swap on the same win partition, didn't help to solve the problem.
Only doing this resetting (using registry) on partition on raid 0, taking a backup of it and restoring it onto the primary raid 5 partition, solved the issue.
Don't ask me why... :confused:
Perhaps you are wondering why i did separate win and swap + temp.
Well, i don't like temp files continuously fragmenting windows partition.
About the swap, the answer is very simple: take a backup of C: with and without swap file and look at the difference between file sizes.... :)
End of digression.

OK, below some notice on what i did after that bunch of tedious stuffs described above.

- Zeroed the detached HD with a hex editor (i didn't like to wait the whole formatting).
I tried to format the very last part of the HD creating a big partition from the start and a little one reaching the end.
After formatted the latter, the raid signature was still there.:confused:
So i opened a disk editor and zeroed it by hand (the 3 last sectors of HD).
I did the same onto the MBR and partition table (first hd sector).

A very strange behavior of Disk Management (in windows) is that after blanking partition table and the MBR and then refreshing the view in it, nothing happens. Partitions was still showed like if they had not been deleted.
Restarting windows (again on raid 5 degraded) fixed the issue and i finally saw all the changes.
It seems windows has a cache of drives configuration. It doesn't refresh the configuration from partition data at all!
Only if you make changes using Disk management you'll see them at once.

After that, i just spent 2 minute to take a performance test of single WD HD.
This is the result....
HDTune_Benchmark_SATA_WD5000ABYS.png


Then, i powered off the PC, and reconnected the HDD to the intel ICH9R controller and rebooted.
As expected the "new" drive was detected as "Non-RAID Disk" while the others were still joined in raid 0 failure ad raid 5 degraded.
A this point i pressed Ctrl-I to enter in raid bios.
WOW, a windows showed me a waring "DEGRADED VOLUME DETECTED", "Degraded volume and disk available for rebuilding detected. Selecting a disk initiates a rebuild."
I selected the "fresh new wiped" WD drive and pressed enter.
Of course, i had to fix raid 0 deleting and recreating it again.
At the end, i exited from the bios and booted again.
This time i had raid 5 in rebuilding state while the raid 0 is on state Normal as it should be.

Raid 5 partition fired up flawlessly.
Well, let's have a look at Disk Management....
As soon as i opened it, it showed me the wizard to initialize the new 300 GB disk.

At this point we have at least 3 ways we could follow:
1) Let the Disk Management init the drive for us (creating a standard master boot record and a blank primary partition table on it).
1.1) continuing on the GUI, we could create by hand all the partitions we need.
1.2) otherwise we could run a DISKPART script doing the job of creating partition for us. Of course we prepared the script by hand, looking at the raid 0 partition configuration that was there before the failure.

2) initialize the disk by hand replacing the sector 1 with the previously saved image of it.

The first two methods (1 and 1.1) or (1 and 1.2) i'm pretty confident they will work.
So i tested the 3rd one, the number 2 just to play with sector 1.
Forgive me the word's game.

I want to spend just two words about a free windows version tool usually found in linux/unix like system: DD. Here another link to learn more about it.

Well it is a very useful tool and it is easy to use.
You can make a bit-to-bit copy from a source to a destination.
Source and destination could be disks, as well as floppies or keyboard input. See the documentation for a list of all supported devices.
You could save an image of a floppy disk in just one step.
I used it to make a backup of MBR + Master Partition Table (Sector 1).

So, before simulating the failure of a disk, i saved the first sector of the raid 0 volume to a binary file.
The command was something like that:
DD if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=x:\backup\Disk0_sector1.img count=1

Type: DD --list to see all the available devices and volumes you can deal with.

To restore the content from the image onto the HDD 1st sector will be:
DD of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 if=x:\backup\Disk0_sector1.img count=1

Very easy.
I'm going to do that replace just now and let's see what happens on sector 1...
Done.
Ok, DD wrote correctly the sector onto the HDD (i opened the sector in an Hex editor), but as stated before, neither Disk Management nor DISKPART see the changes. :mad:

I tried to rescan disks (menu Action->Rescan Disks) but nothing changed.
Tried also to go the other way around: i initialized the disk using Disk Management (OK), created a primary partition (OK) and then opened the hex editor on the sector 1.
Going ahead, i erased the whole sector filling it with 0 (zero) values, saved changes and rescanned disks from disk management: AGAIN, nothing happened! :bang head
It still shows the partition i created inside it, like the partition table was still there.
This strange behavior could be a bug or a "feature" of windows xp pro.
As stated before, only after restarting windows i could see all the changes done.
But rebooting at this point means having a partition table on raid 0 saying "hey, there is an active partition on this disk, please boot from me!".
Of course we are not ready to boot on that partition yet.
So the trick would be forcing the bios to boot from raid 5 again in order to complete the restore process.
Not very easy and time consuming.

Summing it up: if you have a single partition, Disk Management is the way to go, the easiest one. Just create your partition and you'll be ok!
If you had a complex partition scheme (primary and extended partitions), you'd use a DISKPART script and you'll have the whole scheme back in seconds.

I think i spent enough time playing at "The Sector one poor KungFu" game. :p

It's time to go ahead and finish the restoring process.

I have just booted from raid 5 partition and i'm going to create the primary partition where we restore the backup of C:.
We are still there....

So, i opened the disk management, initialized the disk and created a primary partition of 20 GB and did a QUICK FORMAT.
Absolutely no need to format it completely.
All needed data is already stored onto the backup.
We just need windows changes the filesystem type in the partition table for this partition from "06" to "07".

This is the master partition table before quick format:
00000001B0 0000 0000 002C 4463 7A14 09E1 0000 0001 .....,Dcz..á....
00000001C0 0100 06FE FFFF 3F00 0000 340A 8002 0000 ...þÿÿ?...4.€...
00000001D0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000001E0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000001F0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 55AA ..............Uª


and this is after:
00000001B0 0000 0000 002C 4463 7A14 09E1 0000 0001 .....,Dcz..á....
00000001C0 0100 07FE FFFF 3F00 0000 340A 8002 0000 ...þÿÿ?...4.€...
00000001D0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000001E0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000001F0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 55AA ..............Uª


Of course we again could do this change with a disk editor at any time before rebooting but it is so easy to do with disk management....hehehe

If you take a look at DriveimageXML, in the listbox containing all the partitions, under the column "Type" you'll see just those numbers.
6 for fat16-huge/non formatted partition.
7 for a NTFS formatted one.

Of course, Quick format do something more: it writes the boot sector (first sector of partition) and File allocation table for NTFS.
We could live without this extra work because the backup image of C: disk contains them.

Then, i opened DriveimageXML, selected the brand new partition (DISK0#1) just created on raid 0, selected the file to restore from and began the restore.

Well, the last thing to do is to make the partition active in order to be able booting from it and, of course, reboot and enjoy the restored system at full raid 0 speed!

Let me try it....

YESSS, IT WORKS!!!

Well, just after the reboot i checked the disk and found a minor problem fixed with "chkdsk c: /F".
Rebooted again and it went well.
So give the chkdsk a try just to be sure all went well in restoring the system.
I'm pretty happy now...heheheh.

I've to excuse me for the long post but i wanted to share with you my "try & fails" too.

Any comment will be appreciated.

Bye
JDany3D

OT1: today i got my new LG LCD 24" L245BW monitor. Men, it's fantastic! That's another reason to be happy for!

OT2: Bing, i played Wing Chung Kung Fu for a long time in real life.....hahahahh
 
Thanks for sharing ! Definately really good experience you got there ! :thup:

Your post #880 and #883 are now bookmarked ! :D

One thing about pagefile, I do set mine for it's size both min and max equal size, and it won't grows and get fragmented anymore, example at post #678.

Also thanks for the DD program's link !

JDany3D said:
OT2: Bing, i played Wing Chung Kung Fu for a long time in real life.....hahahahh
Wow, that's real stuff there ! My kungfu is just involved keyboard and fingers ! LOL :D
 
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Phew...this thread. It's like school for storage. ;) I've got 2 quick questions I'll know the answers to tomorrow, but wondered if anyone's tried it.

1. ICH8R to ICH9R, will it pick up the array?
2. If it doesn't, would there be any "fingerprints" leftover from the ICH8R?
 
Jod said:
1. ICH8R to ICH9R, will it pick up the array?
2. If it doesn't, would there be any "fingerprints" leftover from the ICH8R?[/

Your answer :

1. Yes, migration for the raided drives from ICH8R to ICH9R works. :D

It's just you have to re-install the OS since it is on different mobo for the boot raid volume, and this is an obvious one.

2. All raid information (metadata) is stored inside the drives, NOT in the mobo or bios.


Hope this helps.
 
Jod said:
Phew...this thread. It's like school for storage. ;) I've got 2 quick questions I'll know the answers to tomorrow, but wondered if anyone's tried it.

1. ICH8R to ICH9R, will it pick up the array?
2. If it doesn't, would there be any "fingerprints" leftover from the ICH8R?

bing's right... straight over... in fact if you're using Vista, you don't even need to reinstall the O/S (I just changed from P5B to P5K) edit... at least I'm pretty sure I didn't... starting to doubt my own memory now lol.
 
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bing said:
One thing about pagefile, I do set mine for it's size both min and max equalt, and it won't grows and get fragmented anymore, example at post #678.

Hi bing,

yes, i usually do that. The fragmenting issue was referred to system in general.
What i would like to avoid is to backup 3-4 GB of swap file.
Even using compression it takes some space, a wasted space into the backup.
Would be better to dedicate a separate partition for it and for temps data (like windows temp files, user temp files, temporary internet files and so on).
In that way you will backup only what is really useful.
The partition should be as close as possible to the windows installation one in order to let HDD heads moving less.
The drawback will be using the recovery partition on raid 5 containing a backup of C: from raid 0, still pointing to an non existent temp/swap partition.
It will still boot, but it won't work very well.

A possible solution would be:
- Install the system with temp and swap as default.
- Make a backup.
- restore it onto the raid 5 partition.
- then change the settings on raid 0 to move swap and temps on another partition.
- Continue your work

- If a drive fail you will use the not updated recovery partition containing swap and temp.
To keep it updated, you should repeat those steps on every important backup.
hmmmh, not a good solution.

Another way is to put temp and swap into a partition with fixed drive letter like "x:" on raid 5. So even in the case of a failure you'll still be able to access it from raid 5 recovery partition without changing anyhing.

Thanks again.
Bye
JDany3D
 
Hi all,

reading again my last posts, it seems they are too much confusing.

I rewrite only the needed steps here below for the sake of readability:

GOALS
- Have a system installed on a fast raid 0 volume
- Be able to continue working in few minutes in the case of HDD failure and raid 0 failure.
- Be able to restore the failed raid 0 without booting from CD.
- Get these goals using Intel Matrix Raid technology

INSTALLING THE SYSTEM
- Unplug network cable from PC.
- Enter the Intel Matrix Raid Bios (CTRL-I)
- Create a Raid 0 volume (Stripe 128Kb, size of volume as needed)
- Create a Raid 5 volume (Stripe 128Kb, size of volume as needed)
- Exit the bios
- Boot from Windows installation CD
- After few seconds press F6 when asked for additional SCSI drivers.
- Let windows goes ahead and wait for request to insert floppy containing the additional SCSI/SATA drivers.
- Insert one floppy containing the driver for every disk controller have to be installed (usually two: Intel ICHxR and a secondary motherboard RAID controller)
- When asked to choose windows installation place, create a primary partition, write down or remember the exact size in MB (for later use), format it as NTFS and let windows installs itself inside that.
- Complete the windows installation and reboot as needed.
- After windows installation is done, install all system drivers needed using the installation CDs provided with your hardware.
- Open the Device management and look for something missing (Yellow exclamation mark).
- Open the Intel Matrix Raid manager and enable write-back cache for both raid 0 and raid 5 arrays.
- Under "My Computer"->properties->Advanced tab->Performance settings->Advanced tab->Virtual memory->change button, set a fixed swap size in custom size boxes. Initial and maximum size should contain the same value. How much allocate is up to you. A range from 512 to 3072 MB should work well depending on how many applications you open at the same time and how much RAM you have installed in your system.
- Reboot the system letting changes take effect.
- Install Antivirus (like Avira Antivir freeware), Anti Spyware (like SpyBot 1.4 and Spyware Blaster), and a serious software Firewall (like Sygate Personal Firewall 5.5).
- Plug in your network cable.
- Connect to internet and update Windows, antivirus and antispyware software
- Download and install DriveimageXML backup software or something better.
- Download and install a good defragmenting software (like Diskeeper or something you like more)
- Empty temporary internet file and windows/user temp files.
- Reduce the recycle bin space to save disk space and empty it.
- Do a full system defrag (one or more time as needed).
- Do a volume check (chkdsk c: ). If you get some errors try "chkdsk c: /f" and reboot.
- Open DriveimageXML and take a first backup (using compression option) of the installed partition saving it to another partition, drive or DVD-RW for now. That backup will be your base system backup, very useful in the case of further software installation troubles. You'll be able to restore the base configuration as needed and continue installing from there without reinstalling OS from scratch.
- Install every other software you need in the system.
- Make a perfect system configuration as needed.
- Do a system restore point (only XP systems).
- Again empty all temps file and recycle bin.
- Check the volume again
- Do a full partition backup (with same options like before).
- You are done and ready for the next step.

PREPARING THE SYSTEM FOR A RAID DISK FAILURE
- Boot from raid 0.
- Open the Intel Matrix Raid manager and verify (right clik on it) the raid 5 array. It will take some hours. This operation is needed to ensure raid 5 reliability. Wait until the process ends.
- Open Disk Management.
- Follow the wizard to initialize the raid 5 disk volume (if showed).
- Create a primary active partition on raid 5 Volume of the exactly same size in MB you have on raid 0. Remember, you wrote it down.
- Do a full NTFS format of it (from Disk Management) in order to check bad sectors. This will be your "recovery system partition".
- Open DriveimageXML and restore the full system backup into the brand new formatted partition on raid 5.
- Mark the partition as active.
- Check the new volume ("chkdsk x:", where "x:" is you new volume letter)
- If you like, make a second copy of backup files onto a raid 5 partition. I think it's a good idea to have a second copy to access from in case the first one get corrupted. Never save a backup file of raid 0 partition on another raid 0 partition. You won't be able to access it as soon as one of raid 0 drives fails.
- At this point you are ready to test or use the recovery partition in case of failure.

DISK AND RAID 0 FAILURE
- You start your PC and during POST (Power On Self Test) and the Raid bios inform you that one of raid drives failed. Your raid 0 is in state "Failure" and your raid 5 is marked as "Degraded".
- Enter the Intel raid bios to identify the SATA port where the missing drive is located.
- Exit the bios and power of the PC.
- If you are skilled enough to avoid hurting yourself and the PC, check SATA and power cable connections inside your PC.
- Restart and see if you get the same error message. If not, you are lucky and something was not firmly connected inside you Pc. If yes, connect the failed drive to the second mobo controller.
- Restart the Pc and see if the second controller finds the "failed" HD. If yes, maybe there is something wrong with the sata port of Intel controller. Try another sata port or replace the sata cable.
- If you have a second PC, try to connect the failed HD to it and see if find it.
- If the drive is really dead (you ear strange noises from it or even it does't start rotating at all), remove it from PC and send it for repairing. Sorry....:shrug:
- So you have a drive less now.
- Power on the system and boot again.
- Don't care about bios raid 0 failure message and let the system continue.
- If you configured the HD drive boot order in this way Raid0 then Raid5 in the motheboard bios, you should boot automatically from the recovery partition you created before.
- Your C: drive will be now the first active partition on raid 5, that is, the recovery one.
- Reconfigure directory pointers into applications if there is something still pointing to the failed raid 0.
- You can now work as you used to do with raid 0 using this partition on raid 5.
- Remember to make backups as well.

DISK AND RAID 0 RESTORING
- You got back you repaired/replaced HD.
- Connect it inside your PC.
- Power on the PC and as soon as the Intel Raid Bios appears, press CTRL-I.
- You should see a message like this "DEGRADED VOLUME DETECTED", "Degraded volume and disk available for rebuilding detected. Selecting a disk initiates a rebuild."
- Select the new drive to be joined to the others.
- Delete the failed RAID 0 volume. Be carefull, don't touch the raid 5!
- Create a new raid 0 volume like the deleted one.
- Exit from the bios and restart.
- You should see the raid 0 is in "Normal" state and raid 5 state is "Rebuild" during the P.O.S.T. process.
- You are still booting from raid 5 partition. Raid 0 is completely empty.
- If you worked on your system for some days, maybe you modified it from last backup, so open DriveimageXML, delete all temps files, empty the recycle bin and make a full backup of system partition. Pay attention to not include other backups stored in the same partition.
- Open Disk Management.
- Initialize the new raid 0 volume.
- Create on raid 0 your primary system partition of the same size of the previous one there were on the failed raid 0.
- Format the partition with NTFS (use quick format only if the HDD has been already formatted once, at least).
- Open DriveimageXML and click on Restore button.
- Select the primary partition you have just created
- Locate the last full backup you saved and click next buttons to begin the restoring process. Wait until it is finished and check for errors on log.
- Open a command prompt and check the new restored partition (on raid 0) using chkdsk x: (where "x:" is the assigned drive letter)
- In disk management, make that partition active.
- Reboot the system.
- Now that an active partition is again present on raid 0, you should automatically boot from it.
- To be sure you booted from the raid 0, open disk management and see wich partition has the "C:" letter. If it is on raid 0 it's ok. Otherwise, restart, go into motherboard bios, save (F10) again the disk boot order and reboot. Now it should be ok.
- After rebooting from raid 0, check again the restored C: volume against errors.
- If you restored the system from a backup of C: partition on raid 5, check if you need to reconfigure some applications.
- Enjoy again the restored system on raid 0.

That's all.
Hope this helps.

Bye
JDany3D

PS: if you have anything to add, modify or delete from this little guide or you would like to fix my bad english, i will edit this post to make it better. Thanks!
 
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bing said:
All raid information (metadata) is stored inside the drives
Cool, I figured so, but didn't know if ICH9R would read/verify from the SB before it. Or perhaps have some sort of issue.

fritzman said:
...Vista, you don't even need to reinstall the O/S...
That's the best part. I was actually reinstalling for dual boot XP/Vista when it happened. The only array that's important to me's the 0 w/ 2x250GB Hitachi's. So I really didn't have anything to be concerned about...except the mobo I just gouged w/ a flat head. :( Anyone wanna buy a DFI P965-S on the cheap? :beer:
 
Wow ! JDany3D, thats what I called a truly good Matrix Raid Initialization Setup Strategy and Recovery Manual ! :thup: :clap:

Thanks a lot for that intensive documentation you've made there ! I like your idea too, maybe I will do that at my future Matrix Raid rig too ! :D

Another JDany3D's post bookmarked ! ;)
 
bing said:
Wow ! JDany3D, thats what I called a truly good Matrix Raid Initialization Setup Strategy and Recovery Manual ! :thup: :clap:

Thanks a lot for that intensive documentation you've made there ! I like your idea too, maybe I will do that at my future Matrix Raid rig too ! :D

Another JDany3D's post bookmarked ! ;)

Hi bing,
hehe, thanks.:beer:
I'm happy you found it useful.

It was useful to me too because i had to rearrange all ideas and steps in my mind! :rolleyes:
I have to thanks this thread, specially you and fritzman: here i collected and learned most matrix raid tricks, infos and strategies.
What a cool mates you are! :clap:

Bye and have a nice day.
JDany3D
 
bing said:
OT, I can see you got Q6600 there, mind participate in this UVOC polling HERE ? :D

OT, i would like to join that thread but i need much time, hours, maybe days to find and collect my own results (using a try and fail process).

My holidays have gone: tomorrow i have to come back to work...:cry:...and i still have to install most needed software apps on my new rig, backup 260+ GB on DVD and a lot of other stuffs to do.:bang head
bing, i'm really very sorry but i can't join them now.
Maybe later, as soon as i'll be less busy.

Thank you anyway for inviting me.
Bye
JDany3D
 
JDany3D said:
Hi bing,
hehe, thanks.:beer:
I'm happy you found it useful.

It was useful to me too because i had to rearrange all ideas and steps in my mind! :rolleyes:
I have to thanks this thread, specially you and fritzman: here i collected and learned most matrix raid tricks, infos and strategies.
What a cool mates you are! :clap:

Bye and have a nice day.
JDany3D

np mate... this is definitely a 'learning' and 'evolving' thread, but all kudos to bing... he is the Master!

Like bing... I have printed out your post so I can set my next Matrix up that way, I'm just waiting for these drives to appear here...

2.jpg

The times (if they are correct) look fantastic!
 
fritzman said:
np mate... this is definitely a 'learning' and 'evolving' thread, but all kudos to bing... he is the Master!
Yes, yes, long life to bing! :beer:

fritzman said:
Like bing... I have printed out your post so I can set my next Matrix up that way, I'm just waiting for these drives to appear here...
I'm honored to ear such a thing.:D
I hope i didn't miss anything in the list.
Let's say you'll be an "installation guide" beta tester... LOL:p
Let me know if you'll find something wrong.

fritzman said:
2.jpg

The times (if they are correct) look fantastic!
WOW, < 1ms!!!! :eek:
Even in the case the seek time would be a little bit higher, it still remains an amazing time.
These drives would be faster than Raptors.

Anyway, i think i will better to wait some reviews of them, just to be sure of the overall performance in simulated application specific tests.

Doing my researches in this field, in order to buy my WD drives, i learned that firmware has a considerable impact on the real drive speed.
One example for all: seagate 7200.10 drives, drop from 70-80MB/s STR with single thread access to a unacceptable 7 MB/s with 4 thread simultaneous accesses.
So be carefull.
I hope seagate had improved his firmwares.

Let me know if you buy them and, of course, post here the results!
I'm very courios to see how they perform.
Bye
JDany3D
 
Fritzman,

I'm afraid that is a typo at their web site, since that seek time is too good to be true, download this HERE (PDF) for it's detail datasheet and it confirms it.

Imo, still they are really fast with average seek < 10 ms.

Watch at the RED marker I made.
Barracuda ES.PNG
 
Thanks mate... I thought so. (if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... definitely a typo!)

So what are your thoughts... better to go the JD way (Western Digital) or the Seagate way (the ST3500320NS)?

Value your opinion.

BTW... I just ordered 3 x 36Gb Raptors for Matrix1 & will buy three 500Gb drives later for Matrix2.
 
Thanks, but honestly I never use it and the WD as well. Usually I will wait for some reviews for it, but alas this is enterprise ES model, while most popular review sites are interested only in desktop model.

Have you check storagereview.com ? or maybe lurk around their forum to get some clue ?

Woah, new matrix sets are coming ? and RAPTORS !!!! :drool:
Really, in term of "flying hours" at building matrix raid, no doubt, currently none can beat you Fritzman ! :D

Edit :
Fritzman, just a suggestion, since you will be playing with those Raptors and also probably Seagate, imo, you could create a good thread on the comparison for single Raptor vs Raided non Raptor drives.

It will be quite interesting to watch, and I believe it will answer the popular questions that pop out almost all the times like "Should I go with Raptor or Raid 0 non Raptor" or other similiar variations around the Raptor. :)

-
 
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Can you dual boot with a matrix array? I take it you would have to make 3 total slices and put the OS on the first 2 and data on your 3rd slice

Anyone do this? Was thinking Vista/XP/data on 3 320gb seagate perps
 
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