Subject: IDE RAID 0 for computational speed?

From: Josh Bowden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 14:06:40 +0930

Hello,

I am wondering if anybody has experience with RAID 0 setup for workstations running ab-initio programs. I would think that this would be a v.good way to increase disk access speed and a good way to increase disk storage space. Does RAID 0 increase integral file R/W access and therefore increase computational speed? or are other areas the bottleneck in a computer+ab-initio program? Is anyone usinig IDE HD RAID cards, such as those from Promise Tech. and have you found that these increase computational performance?

Thankyou for your time.
I will summarise.

Josh.

Josh Bowden
University of South Australia
Ian Wark Research Institute
[email-masked]

---

From: Laurence Lavelle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 22:38:53 -0700

Hi Josh,

With respect to SCSI RAID 0 the answer is a big yes, yes. However if you
are using the HyperCube or Gaussian products with NT as the OS then the
answer is maybe. Both companies have limited the file size to 2GB which
they say is based on FAT 32. I have communicated with them many times about
implementing NTFS. It is a simple procedure and both companies have
indicated that they will support the NTFS file structure in their next
release. 

For FAT the max file size is 2^32 bytes (4.3 GB). 

For NTFS, the max is 2^64 bytes (1.8 x 10^10 GB). I don't think this is
much of limitation.

Laurence

>Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:45:25 -0700
>From: Laurence Lavelle <[email-masked]>
>Subject: Ab initio file size
>
>Please pass this on to your developers.
>
>The Win32 API provides for a 64-bit file seek pointer and files >4GB.
Assuming that the underlying file system can support large files, which
NTFS can. It is simple to detect NT and then support 64-bit file pointer
semantics. 
>
>Basically all you do is declare file pointers using an __int64 data type and
>then pass this type (as 2 32-bit values) to the SetFilePosition() API before
>reading or writing. NT will then happily create a file of whatever size is
>required. Probably require about an hours work by a decent programmer.
>
>Thanks
>Laurence 

 At 02:06 PM 7/27/98 +0930, Josh Bowden wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I am wondering if anybody has experience with RAID 0 setup for
workstations running ab-initio programs. I would think that this would be a
v.good way to increase disk access speed and a good way to increase disk
storage space. Does RAID 0 increase integral file R/W access and therefore
increase computational speed? or are other areas the bottleneck in a
computer+ab-initio program? Is anyone usinig IDE HD RAID cards, such as
those from Promise Tech. and have you found that these increase
computational performance?
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