No performance increase with software RAID

Hello,

I recently discovered that I could create a software raid in disk manager and set up a RAID 0 to see if there was any difference. It uses 2 drives that are identical apart from disk space (250Gb and 500GB).

The volume i set up was 200GB(100Gb from each drive) and worked fine. However there is no performance increase. Loading times in games and files being copied on the volume are the same as either drive by iteslf, about 40mb/s, while on the internet ive seen videos of windows 7 software raids with speeds of over 100mb/s. Currently its not worth me using a software raid as all i get currently is more cpu usage.

Any help appreciated

Jim

jlyne1234 said:

Hello,

I recently discovered that I could create a software raid in disk manager and set up a RAID 0 to see if there was any difference. It uses 2 drives that are identical apart from disk space (250Gb and 500GB).

The volume i set up was 200GB(100Gb from each drive) and worked fine. However there is no performance increase. Loading times in games and files being copied on the volume are the same as either drive by iteslf, about 40mb/s, while on the internet ive seen videos of windows 7 software raids with speeds of over 100mb/s. Currently its not worth me using a software raid as all i get currently is more cpu usage.

Any help appreciated

Jim

Hello Jim, and welcome to Windows Seven Forums!

RAID adds certain complications to a system, that for me makes it more trouble than its worth. However, the RAID 0 setup is supposed to divide the disk access between the two (or more) drives, which in theory doubles (?) access speed.

If I may ask, which version of 7 are you using? What RAID did you setup?

A helpful RAID link: RAID | Dell

Cheers!
Robert

I only recommend software raids in the event that you have to have a larger volume than you currently have with any 1 physical disk. As you can see, performance increases aren't significant. People getting higher throughput, may just have faster hard drives. For example, my single disk WD Caviar Black averages around 90MB/s and I have a Seagate 7200.12 which averages right around 100MB/s

Im using Windows 7 professional 64bit and a raid 0 setup using 100gb of 2 drives. Ive just googled a bit and found a microsoft article about how raid performance can be reduced if sectors are not aligned (or something like that). Ill give that ago and report back.