RAMDAC

Hi chispy, thank you for this thread. It is my first and at the same time my last posting here, as I've decided to leave this unfair community. A few weeks ago I had 4x SSD which I optimized with MFT to obtain some weird 33k score. That result was deleted and after reading the hwbot rules, I understood it and accepted it of course. So once I tasted the blood I wanted more, and I bought 4 additional SSDs with the hope for a top score without MFT or any other cheatings. Well, even these 8 SSDs didn't brought me further than to 22k in PCM 05. I decided then to go extreme and to install totally 16 SSDs. The financial investment was gigantic, as I had not to buy only the disks but also a proper RAID controller for the dozens of disks. The disks were easy available, so I had just to wait for the controller which came luckily right before weekend. At the beginning the results were very poor and I was very disappointed for spending much money for almost no effects. The mistake was that I combined all disks to one array, awaiting an incredible data rate but it was a bit contraproductive, especially also because I wasn't familiar with all those SuperTrak settings. With 2 OCZ APEX SSD I had an average rate of ca. 350MB/s, which was good but with 4 OCZ in RAID 0, I had just about 460MB/s, then with 6 APEX SSDs- it was a bit more than 550MB/s. (Comparing it to SuperTalent MasterDrive OX with 2 SSDs an average rate of 266MB/s, with 4 SSDs a rate of 512MB/s in Vista and over 700MB/s in Win XP) I remember how I was dreaming about an incredible PCM 05 score while I installed the hardware but the first run with all SSDs on one array brought me solely some poor 98MB/s in PCM 05's XP startup. After a few sleepless nights, I finally found the right combination for the arrays, for the stripe sizes, the block sizes etc. I found out which ones were better for OS installation, the OCZ or the SuperTalent, further I found out the optimum amount of RAID arrays to create a dynamic volume and I found the optimum amount of volumes for the OS array and much more... (like e.g. the best performance settings on the SuperTrak controller itself) Further I played with variations of different RAID controllers, e.g. took 2 SSD for the onboard JMicron controller, 4 SSD for Intel's ICH10R and the other 10 were plugged into the Promise SuperTrak controller. With all three RAID controllers enabled I had some compatibility issues that forced me to disable one of them. JMicron worked fine with SuperTrak but too slow in performance, while Intel's ICH10R was damn fast but with all 6 slots populated, it showed me "Reset Port Error!!!" on all disks and it didn't allow me to configure SuperTrak's RAID while booting. (Unfortunately or fortunately this error happens only with the OCZ disks, when using the SuperTalent with all slots populated, there are no errors?!) Anyway, accepting the error messages through Boot and using SuperTrak's WebPAM console in Windows, allowed me to create finally my desired RAID arrays. The first run with 2 logical arrays (12x SSD + 4x SSD), plus 2x SSD RAID 0 as primary and active on JMicron for the installed OS, brought me impressive 29k, which I submitted immediately to Futuremark and afterwards to hwbot. http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm05=1887600 Later I found out that my score was deleted and I went to the PCM 05 rules page, seeing that PhysX wasn't permitted. Alright, I disabled it, changed at the same time the configuration to ICH10R as the controller for the active, primary RAID disk for the OS and I made 3 logical RAID arrays through SuperTrak's console. After creating the 3 logical arrays (2x 64GB SSD + 4x 32GB SSD + 4x 32GB SSD - Block size: 4KB, Stripe size: 128kb), I went to Windows' administrative tools where I made one dynamic stripeset volume out of the 3 logical RAID arrays (Block size: 8192 Bytes - but also 16kb and 64kb gave me the same best results and a data rate of over 220MB/s in PCM 05's XP startup) The quintessence of the story is that I've spent a lot of time and a looooot of money, just to be stopped by 4 finnish letters and being treated almost as a cheater now. That SF3D kid reported me twice, once my XP startup of 235MB/s was too high for him to climb and the other time, my Virus scan was too fast for him to follow. It shows me only that this boy never ever had his hands on a dozen SSDs at once. The funny thing was that the email came exactly when I was experimenting how to achieve even higher rates than 235MB/s at XP Startup. The sad thing was that I turned off that pc from then on, seeing no reason to continue anymore. - I could perhaps find some tweaks to lower the scores, or I could degrade again to only 8 SSDs but I won't do this paradox favor to anybody! Well, the only consolation is that I'm retiring at least as a clean world champion, without steroids, HGH, STH, IGF-1, EPO etc. The knowing that I've reached a totally legal world record, is such a great feeling that I don't need any hwbots and boints to confirm it or even award me in form of a JPEG, PNG or GIF trophy. I award myself by seeing live what this machine is able to reach. And the acceptance in form of a valid link at FM is prize enough http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm05=1888775 I feel only sorry for my team but as long as my scores aren't accepted among this illustrious society here, I'm useless anyway. I will submit my future scores to FM and compete against myself only. Chispy, you were the one who took all my GTX285 Gold awards but I like you as we have similar hardware and a similar view, and I wish you luck among those stone age competitors which are still comfortable with their antique methods. You and the honorable eva2000 are right: "The Future Is Now!" All the best to you! (I'm for sure outta here RAMDAC, former hwbot fan