Hey just a quick question about raid 0 stripe size. Originally I had my raid 0 set up with 128kb stripe size however I found this to be a very slow experience. Even slower than a single drive. Recently the whole raid setup failed (when removing a video card) and i opted to just scrap the whole thing and start fresh. I was reading and some people seem to be recommending setting the striping size to 64kb.

Some background info. I'm using a P5K-E Wifi/AP mother board with 2 Sata2 Seagate Barracuda 250Gb 7200rpm harddrives.

Anywho any further advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks..

It generally depends on the type of files you are storing on it. Smaller the files "generally" the smaller the stripe size is better.

Sounds like there was some other issue involved if your RAID-0 was slower than a single drive. And what did you base this off, as RAID-0 will not offer you much if any gains with gaming. However, will offer great gains in large read/write operations.

Well i'm storing a whole mixture of file types from 1-7gig iso's mp3's pictures primarily and installs for programs and apps. the reason why i believe the computer is running slower is because when it was running off of the single drive it was performing at a certain speed / efficiency from boot to load of any application / game. Upon setting up the raid with the 128kb stripe size it was nothing but problems. Load times were lengthened by a small amount but large enough to be considered noticeable.

I've setup the raid with the 64kb stripe size and have already noticed almost double the performance of the 128kb stripe and from what i remember a noticeable improvement over the original single drive HOWEVER,

i'm still having the same issue with my installs. Files that are known not to be corrupt are corrupting upon extracting using winrar and 7zip, but in a totally seperate instance the files will extract without issue. Normally this isn't a problem because something could affect the install at any given time however the frequency of these errors is what has me concerned. Anyway i'm beginning to think my computer just doesn't like raid 0.

One more thing of note. Windows update, i'm trying to udate to Vista Service Pack 1, it will download and fail over and over on the installation (some of the other updates on the way up to SP1 did the same thing). Eventually if i try it enough it will work (going to do that when I get home from work tonight) but whats up with that?

Sounds like one of the drives maybe failing. Try running a full windows chkdsk ( i usually use chkdsk x: /v /r /x (where x is the drive letter))

I am running windows Vista on a single drive and have problems with winrar files being corupted even though I can extract the same rar files on my XP disk without issue. Methinks this is an issue with Vista and not your drive. However I was able to install Vista SP1 without issue. I suspect Vista's UAC for the problems with Winrar.

If you are running Vista with UAC enabled you are insane i believe.