Strange problem

Musty Pie · 19 Oct 2009 at 13:03

Ok bare with me as this might take a bit of explaining.

I and a friend have both recently purchased 2x WD caviar black 500GB drives from ocuk to run a raid 0 setup in our machines

We both have identical chip sets on our motherboards and both are using the same drivers for windows 7 but we are getting different benchmark speeds and im wondering if anything noticeable could be causing the difference? Our machines are also fairly similar in specs (same gfx cards, similar clocks on our CPU's etc)

Now I am running the drives in raid 0 as one large partition and am getting 130mbps minimum 180mbps average and 190mbps max speeds, which i thought was ok.

And my friend has installed the drives in raid 0 with 2 partitions (one 300GB system partition, and one 700gb partition for games installs etc) and is getting 180mbps minimum and 190mbps average and 220mbps max speeds. which is a considerable amount more.

We also have 2 different combined sizes (mine being 940GB and his being 980GB).

Please help me understand what could be causing the difference before i try a reinstall.

Could my drives be faulty? would it be worth RMA'ing the drives or reinstalling with the same partitions to compare again?

:confused:

ETNiES · 19 Oct 2009 at 14:55

I really doubt you'd be allowed RMA the drive if it's running perfectly

hyperst · 19 Oct 2009 at 14:58

well do you have identical boards, really to compare everything would have to be identical and not just similar

Musty Pie · 19 Oct 2009 at 15:24

I can understand it from that respect but its just a little confusing that the jump is rather noticeable. I wouldn't be that concerned if it was only a few MBPS but the difference is certainly noticeable.

kcer · 19 Oct 2009 at 15:37

What motherboards do you both have?

00bob00 · 19 Oct 2009 at 15:45

At a guess - it's to do with the partitioning? Since he's assigned 300gb to system, allowing access to the quickest part of the platter and the rest as storage/games on the slower access part of the partition. I guess he's running HDtune from his system part of partition?

i paraphrase from this post:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=15101928&postcount=8

Musty Pie · 19 Oct 2009 at 15:51

Yes chewie using hd tune which is installed on the main os partition. However HDTune (I thought) benched the whole array as a single thing regardless of the partitions?

can anyone confirm this?

00bob00 · 19 Oct 2009 at 16:04

compare your access times, or rerun the test on both hard drives using the "most accurate" option and compare, it might be easier to post both benchmarks up here