Is this normal for a RAID 0 array?

[Dabombinable]

I've been running 2x 250GB Samsung Spinpoint HA250JC in RAID 0 for a while, and I've been noticing that with small files the array performs over twice as fast as it does with large files. Is this normal for an RAID 0 array? Looking through Google RAID 0 isn't supposed to have this kind of impact with large files so I don't know what's going on.

[leadeater]

Could be a few things.

• Delayed write
• Hard drive disk cache
• RAID controller cache, if you are using hardware raid with cache

If the files are small enough they get treated differently depending on the file system. Really small files often only get written to the file system table or in a meta data store. Best way to find out if it's caching is copy 20GB (or size larger than your ram) of 1KB files, if it stays fast likely no caching but not always true.

 

Bigger questions is, why on earth are you still using such old disks?

[Dabombinable]

Could be a few things.

• Delayed write
• Hard drive disk cache
• RAID controller cache, if you are using hardware raid with cache

If the files are small enough they get treated differently depending on the file system. Really small files often only get written to the file system table or in a meta data store. Best way to find out if it's caching is copy 20GB (or size larger than your ram) of 1KB files, if it stays fast likely no caching but not always true.

 

Bigger questions is, why on earth are you still using such old disks?

Long story short: cool, quite, no signs of degradation (using SMART) after 4 years powered on-aka reliable.

Edit: I'd have a 1TB array but 2 HDD seem to have damaged control boards