RAID, why?

[soulfly1448]

Someone give me some real world insight.

I've never been able to understand why, exactly, a home user (even an OC'er) needs to go with a RAID set up. :shrug: Don't see the point other than braggin' rights.

Yes, I've seen the stats, SATA drives vs. IDE drives. A few seconds loading a game aren't worth it.

So, why RAID? What does it actually do that is so great? Two IDE drives works friggin great! One with the OS and core progs and the second for mass storage and games.

I need some actual input on this, please.

[CalicoDreams]

My opinion:

In regards to SATA or IDE, i think that it just comes down to there being a general shift towards the newer technology. Moreover, the price difference isn't that much of an issue, particularly if you are an enthusist. This coupled with the improvement in real world performance (it is noticable) make me choose SATA over IDE everytime.

RAID 0 however i have no positive comments about for a desktop user, even if you are a geek. The only real world effect on productivity that RAID 0 will have is on multimedia development/production. Where time is money, opening VERY large files is required on a daily basis if not more often and this is your living, your means of income.

RAID 1 however is useful as it simplifies backup, which people do not do enough, especially non-geeks. It saves time (in the grand scheme of things).

Just my thoughts

[Enablingwolf]

I use RAID1 on my machine for my storage drive. I value the data on in that area. I do regular backups and take care of the drives in side my machine. The RAID1 drives also hold the backups for my OS drive. I just want the secuirty of knowing if one drive fails, I still can get the data and be usable.

If you mean RAID0 in your querry. Well it does boost large file transfers. I had the same drives in RAID0 and it sped up large file moves. The seeks times suffered. Loading games seem to be large chunks of data being moved, so it does help in that area.

http://www.acnc.com/04_00.html

Good link to show the different levels of RAID

[Albaholic]

Real raid has tons of applications for a home user and people like us. Like fault tolerance and the preservation of data. I personally dont like raid 1 because you loose so much space to a mirror. I plan on setting up a raid 5 of 320gb drives within the next week or so.

[Snugglebear]

RAID0 in a single user environment using IDE/ATA drives is pretty pointless. Gains in contiguous throughput are offset by the increased seek times and risk of failure inherent in use of a stripeset.

RAID1 at least buys you a degree of insurance against single drive failure, but understand that a mirror is not a backup. I've seen far too many people over the years kick and scream because they accidentally deleted, or had a virus/kid brother/big sister/girlfriend/angry parrot wipe out their data. Mirrors do just that, so if something commands the controller to wipe out the data, the controller will be more than happy to oblige and eliminate both copies, sending one unhappy user into the drama that is low-level data recovery. Many controllers in consumer-level hardware are also pretty cheap, and in all honesty I've seen more people with controller errors (arrays erroneously marked as failed/broken, flaky drivers, etc.) than those with a failed drive in their mirror. Lastly, consumer-level controllers are also disappointing in that they generally do not support independent read ops from drives in mirrors, and thus give no read speed boost.

[Galt]

A few seconds loading a game aren't worth it.

This gives me the distinct impression that you're one of the many people who have unfortunately come to equate RAID with RAID 0. If that's the case, it's a real shame because RAID 0 has nothing on 'real' RAID. I can assure you, a well thought out RAID 5 is much better than the two PATA system (I assume you mean PATA when you say IDE).

[Enablingwolf]

RAID does not shine until you give every drive its own channel also. Most just plug all the drives into one channel. I made sure my RAID1 had each drive on its own channel. It does make for more cable/ribbon. To be able to get independant read/writes makes a difference.

[Snugglebear]

RAID does not shine until you give every drive its own channel also. Most just plug all the drives into one channel. I made sure my RAID1 had each drive on its own channel. It does make for more cable/ribbon. To be able to get independant read/writes makes a difference.

Drives are still barely using more than half of what a PATA channel makes available during sustained transfers. Placing two drives on channel does not have much of a negative impact. SATA makes the issues moot, and while SCSI channels can still be bottlenecked, it's hard to find chassis with backplanes that will put more than 4-6 drives on a single chain (8 is the max I've seen most often for a single backplane). Amusingly, the old Promise Fasttrak 100 cards have a bug in the controller that is covered up by their drivers, so if you use Linux/BSD with a RAID1 mirror and the drives are on separate channels, write speed crashes to 2MB/s. Placing both drives on the same channel allows writes to return to normal speeds.

[Sjaak]

Search the forums theres been a good deal of word about this already.

It comes down to ''its faster''.

[Enablingwolf]

I used my old Fasttrak 100 card as a victim in the hardware distruction thread. It performed flawless for that usage.

[damarble]

Can't we just agree to disagree? It looks like the people for/against RAID (specifically 0) are split right down the middle.

The subject has been beat to death, hashed and re-hashed. Old reviews indicated RAID 0 was worthless, recent reviews have shown it to be a huge performance increase w/little negative side affects.

Instead of listening to the constant arguing on here, put your drives in RAID and compare the "feel" to what you have now. If you don't like it put it back the way it is.

[stunt]

.

Instead of listening to the constant arguing on here, put your drives in RAID and compare the "feel" to what you have now. If you don't like it put it back the way it is.

I agree 100%. I tried 3 different raid systems and no raid using seven drives on my main rig until I settled on raid 10. Instead of listening to all the differing opinions, try it and see whats best for you.

It takes 1 1/2 hours to build a system and a month of evenings and weekends to get the system the way I want it on my personal rig. I just clone a OS and apps drive so I can keep tyring different setups until I find what I like. But when its done its done.........At least for a few months.:)

[greenmaji]

how are seaks harmed by Raid0.. in theory? sounds like a hardware problem to me.

[Maviryk]

Well, for you a few seconds faster load time in games may not be important, but for power-gamers such as myself, it matters. A lot can happen in a few seconds mind you :) .

Yes, it is pointless to put PATA drives in RAID0. RAID1 for backup, sure, if data is important for you.

Personally I've never had a drive fail on me unexpectedly. So I've no need for RAID1.

To each his own, YMMV.

[boris_37]

Well, for you a few seconds faster load time in games may not be important, but for power-gamers such as myself, it matters. A lot can happen in a few seconds mind you :) .

Yes, it is pointless to put PATA drives in RAID0. RAID1 for backup, sure, if data is important for you.

Personally I've never had a drive fail on me unexpectedly. So I've no need for RAID1.

To each his own, YMMV.

yup and as time goes on risk of drive failure is going to happen less. We can even see it in cpu's now, if you used to run them forever before they could get problems. Now however they are built to run forever...

I'll get RAID0 soon and see. I garuntee it will help, after all i transfer alot of big files between hard drives recently and i hate having to wait over 30 minutes... lol

[stunt]

As far as seek times go, I always had about the same seek times on my seagates as the drive was rated for in raid 0 and 1, according to HD Tach. Untill raid 10. Now my seek times are down to 9.8 from 12.5 -13.

[Snugglebear]

how are seaks harmed by Raid0.. in theory? sounds like a hardware problem to me.

The drive platters are not spin-syncrhonized, nor are the read/write heads, ATA units do not necessarily map the same logical address to the same physical blocks, and they have enough intelligence to need to do overhead tasks occasionally. Since data on a stripeset isn't useful until you have the blocks from each stripe to assemble into the whole, if the data is out of position (platters in different points of rotation, heads in wrong place because one drive may be recalibrating, remapping blocks, etc.) you have to wait.

[soulfly1448]

I can dig. Still sounds like most are using for bragging rights really. I am aware of how RAID works. I don't know all of the different iterations, I've only heard of 0, 1 and 3. The fact that in RAID 1 you are essentially only getting half of the total hard drive space available across the two drives is unacceptable to me.

I'll take damarble's advice and give a RAID set up a try and see what all the hubbub is about.

Thanks, guys.

[Sjaak]

The fact that in RAID 1 you are essentially only getting half of the total hard drive space available across the two drives is unacceptable to me.

Half the space - double the security and better read times.


Raid 0: better read & write, half the security

[Enablingwolf]

I use RAID1. When I was setup for zero. I thought about costs and other factors. I would rather have part of my setup secure and ready in case of a possible failure. Drives do fail. It is a matter of when. Sometimes a drive can last for longer then you want the data. Sometimes not. I have data from earlier than 1995, due to protecting it.

My particular board can support up to 12 devices onboard. The cost of adding another drive is so cheap. I thought losing the storage was acceptable for the security of having an extra layer with the RAID1. I have 4 SATA ready for newer drives later on and another 4 PATA. So it is about if I need the room or not.

[MVC]

Aside from the fact that this thread got much longer than I thought it would....

Home users have servers too. My new multimedia/file server is being built with 2TB of RAID 5 (8 250GB WD RE S-ATA drives) that I can expand later when the 500GB (or larger) drives become available at a reasonable price. RAID is useful for other things than slightly better performance in game-loading-time or bragging rights--though it's useful there too :D

[Nebuchadnazzar]

That's sic MVC, i've always wanted to go raid 5 but i haven't had the funds.
I run a raid 0 and honestly i don't see a noticable difference in load times, and i have had it crash once and it was a total pain because i lost alot of data, like a webpage i was hosting.
The only reason i still run raid0 is because the drives are full and i have no way to move my files, and because i've run out of IDE ports on the mobo (i'm using a PCI raid card)

If i ever went raid again it would be either raid 5, or 6 for redundancy.

Raid also provides a means to control many harddrives, like if i had 8 hdds i'd want them raided onto a pci card because of realestate on the motherboard and because i'd want 1, or 2 partitions instead of 8.

[Snugglebear]

That's sic MVC, i've always wanted to go raid 5 but i haven't had the funds.
I run a raid 0 and honestly i don't see a noticable difference in load times, and i have had it crash once and it was a total pain because i lost alot of data, like a webpage i was hosting.
The only reason i still run raid0 is because the drives are full and i have no way to move my files, and because i've run out of IDE ports on the mobo (i'm using a PCI raid card)

You may wish to acquire an external drive. They're fairly inexpensive these days and provide an offline, portable, and multi-platform accessible backup of the data. One I bought saved me quite a few headaches last fall when I was rebuilding all of my machines at once (deferred mx catches up at some point) and needed additional space to move files around between my workstations on Windows, BSD, Solaris, and OSX. The only pain was formatting the drive initially, as not one of the machines I had then could read past 128GB on their IDE channels.


If i ever went raid again it would be either raid 5, or 6 for redundancy.

Raid also provides a means to control many harddrives, like if i had 8 hdds i'd want them raided onto a pci card because of realestate on the motherboard and because i'd want 1, or 2 partitions instead of 8.

Just be careful that RAID doesn't lull you into a false sense of security. Even 5 (with or without hotspares) and 6 aren't qualified as backups for reasons stated above.

In regards to the partition issue, you could always mount additional logical volumes as branches off an existing filesystem. It may not be a true single partition, but to the end user it appears as one.

[MVC]

That's sic MVC, i've always wanted to go raid 5 but i haven't had the funds.
I run a raid 0 and honestly i don't see a noticable difference in load times, and i have had it crash once and it was a total pain because i lost alot of data, like a webpage i was hosting.
The only reason i still run raid0 is because the drives are full and i have no way to move my files, and because i've run out of IDE ports on the mobo (i'm using a PCI raid card)

If i ever went raid again it would be either raid 5, or 6 for redundancy.

Raid also provides a means to control many harddrives, like if i had 8 hdds i'd want them raided onto a pci card because of realestate on the motherboard and because i'd want 1, or 2 partitions instead of 8.
Well, I had seven of the drives in current machines. When I upgraded a couple of them to 400GB drives the 250s became extras. At the same time the machine I'd been using for my kids' file server is getting old and I wanted a multimedia server so I could consolidate stuff that currently spread out on different machines so building a new dedicated server seemed like a real good use for them. I bought two more of the 250GB drives (they're cheap now--just over $100) so after the last machine that's still using 250s is upgraded I'll have one spare drive for the array.

Anyway, here's (http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=4332919&postcount=3) what the front of the new server looks like. I'm using a DFI LanParty "Expert" motherboard, AMD X2 4400 for the CPU, 2GB of OCZ Titanium RAM (though I can double that if necessary), eVGA 7800GT for video in the #2 PCI-E slot and an Areca ARC-1220 PCI-E RAID controller in the #1 PCI-E slot, and a Silverstone Zeus ST56ZF for the PSU. The inside is still a bit of a mess, but I did get Gentoo to (finally) boot correctly last night (OCZ RAM has to be in the the orange slots, not the yellow ones as DFI says in their documentation on the "Expert" board) so now I just need to finish installing the OS and configuring the system. I'll add a few more pics to the original thread I linked to above when I finish and clean up the S-ATA cables.

[Bullnettles]

A quick reply. Before RAID0, about 95MB/s on HD tach. After RAID0 with seperate channels, 194MB/s. I love my RAID setup (even though it isn't a truly redundant setup), but don't trust it for storage of important stuff.

[soulfly1448]

Lord, this thread got WAY to long. I'm not talking about servers. I know home users have them. I'm talking about the gaming rig we all have. I see little reason to spend several hundred dollars on multiple drives in your gaming rig. Stripe this!

[Sjaak]

Im a home user.

I game.

And seeing your loading times cut in half in * is very, very satisfying.


* far cry, doom 3, half-life2 a couple of NFS games, generals, raven shield, swat 4, quake 4 tome TW and some other games

[soulfly1448]

Still can't justify several hundred dollars on a RAID setup for a few seconds of "saved time" while loading a game.

I'd rather spend that money on new video hardware or memory or even a proc. Screw it, I'll get that now I-drive and not have to worry about load times, really! Another several hundred dollars!

[Sjaak]

Several hundred?

Raid controller? - check, onboard
Second drive? - check, already have


I needed the storage space anyway so i just bought a couple of 200GB drives. All it cost me was 5 mins more setup time.

2x200GB seagate 7200.7 drives on onboard IC5HR controller on P4C800-E DLX. Plus three separate 200GB drives for storage and backup of the important stuff on the raid.

[soulfly1448]

Nifty, a non-raid set up works just as well for back up. The extra money comes into play when a) you don't have extra drives (I'm sure you payed money for those 200GB drives) and b) you don't have the extra drives! The whole point of this damn thread was to try to gain some insight into why someone would spend several hundred dollars on a raid 3+ set up for their gaming rig. I'm sorry, my porn isn't that damn important.

[Sjaak]

Raid 0 doesn't ''cost'' you any space the array is as large as all the drives together, as compared to raid 3 or 5 where you lose one drive.

I didn't spend 'extra', i needed that space anyway, to store my movies, game isos etc, stuff that doesn't need a speedy drive. All i did was couple two of the five together for some extra speed without any serious extra cost or effort.