raid 0

[spooling_high]

hey all,

Just finished pieceing my computer together. I feel like a weight is off my shoulders

My next question is should I go with raid 0 or not. My buddy told me that the chance for drives screwing up increases and it doesn't improve gaming much. I am thinking go with it no matter what. But iwant your thoughts

Go with raid (I have 2 320 seagates) or just use thoses drives by themselves. Thanks guys

[NiTrO bOiE]

Hi, a RAID setup with those drives will give you a pretty good performance boost in game loads, as well as for large files.

PM a moderator so they can move this to the "Storage" section of the forum, you'll get a lot more detailed answers there.

[Malpine Walis]

Yah, this would probably be better moved into the storage forum but I will give you a quick rundown.

There are about a dozen different types of RAID array that are common (and probably more like 20 type if you allow for non-standard things that specific manufacturers do to keep you locked in to buying only from them). Of those, there are four common modes that are likely to be supported by your motherboard.

RAID 0
Only needs two drives and is fairly easy to set up. You do get a performance boost on your throughput but it is not going to give you twice the performance. However, it has one major disadvantage, in that if one of the drives dies, all of the data on both are gone.

RAID 1
Also only needs two drives and is about as easy to set up. You do not get any performance boost to speak of but if one drive fails, your system falls back to basically being a single drive until you can get a replacement drive installed. Then over a period of a few hours, the array will rebuild itself and you are protected again.

RAID 5
Needs at least three drives and it a bit more complicated to set up but not overly so. You will get much faster reads than other types, so a game that takes a long time to load on a single drive system will load a good deal faster. You don't get as much of a boost with your writes but there is some and face it, for a gaming box, how important is a boost is the speed of your saves anyway? Also, has fault tolerance in case one drive fails.

RAID 10 (or 1+0 or 0+1, not all manufacturers use the same naming system although there is a technical difference which can be safely ignored in a short run down)
RAID 10 needs four drives and is moderately complicated to set up but still accessible to most people if they work carefully and make sure that they understand what they are doing. Basically, this is like taking a pair of RAID 0 arrays and linking them together as a RAID 1 array. You get the best of both worlds. A decent speed boost and fault tolerance. When one drive fails, it basically becomes a RAID 0 array until you can replace the bad drive.

As you can see, each has advantages and disadvantages. Either 0 or 1 will be cheap and uncomplicated but you have to choose between speed or reliability. On the other hand, 5 or 10 give you both speed and reliability at the cost of more cash up front and a slightly more technical set-up. 5 tends to give you more speed for loading and less for saving but 10 gives you an equal speed boost in both directions.

[Malpine Walis]

OK, now that I have given you a brief overview of common RAID arrays, I want to cover your concerns about reliability. Before we get into the deep end, let's look at the much simpler case of a single hard drive.

Basically, when you look at the specs for a given drive, one of the numbers that you will see is MTBF, which is an acronym for Mean Time Before Failure. If it helps, you can think of that as the average life expectancy for a hard drive. Most common drives sold today have an MTBF of 100,000 hours which works out to anywhere from 5 to 10 years depending on how you use your system.

However, it is important to know that this is just an average. Most drives really are good for a bit over 5 years but some can run longer than that and some will fail sooner. A few rare drives will run much longer or fail much sooner. In fact, you may run into jokes about drives that are called “death star” which really refers to the Desk Star line from IBM and Hitachi (they are legendary for early death).

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Now, what happens when you start building a RAID array as far as drives dying early is a matter that can be somewhat confusing. Some people hold the opinion that a pair of drives that should last 5 years individually, would be twice as likely to suffer failure early, an array with four drives would be four times as likely to suffer failure early and so forth.

Well, yes and no on that point. Remember that MTBF is an average out of thousands of drives in a production run. Actually, you cannot conclude anything statistically about the fate of the few drives that you are going to have from MTBF. So to a major extent, you can still treat your drives as separate bits of hardware.

Yet, it should be noted that due to the fact that RAID arrays do tend to split the workload evenly across all the drives, they will all wear at pretty much the exact same rate. Also, since it is fairly standard to get all identical drives at once from the same source, if there is a bad component that will fail early in that specific production run, once you do have to replace a drive, you should consider looking at the whole array for replacement fairly soon afterward.

Knowing this, some people will intentionally buy drives that are different (same size but different model numbers) enough that a same component failure is reduced. For most of the simpler systems (for home use), this is fine.

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I would also like to note that selecting drives can be of some importance.

The fact is that different drives are not priced linearly by capacity or performance but rather by cost of manufacture. To a really large extent, higher capacity and higher performance drives are pretty much the same as regular drives with fairly inexpensive tweaks.

So a 500GB drive does not cost twice as much as a 250GB drive. Nor does a 1,000,000 hour MTBF drive cost ten times what a 100,000 hour MTBF drive does. Actually, the MTBF does not even affect the price much if at all. Pretty much, the size of the drive is all that matters.

What you would take into account is the number of drives that you need for a given array.

Let's say, just for grins, that the goal is to build a 1TB array. Well, for RAID level 5, you would need five 250 GB drives. On the other hand, for RAID level 1+0, you would need four 500 GB drives.

If you went shopping for those drives, you would not have any problem finding either drive for under $100 for drives that have >1,000,000 hour (50 years of normal use).

So if you do decide to go for a RAID array in the future, I would suggest that you consider either RAID level 5 or 1+0. You would get great performance either way, fault tolerance out the wazoo and plenty of storage space.

[xgtdec]

OH MAN the timing of this could not be better, with the machine below i had been playinf my games and movies with the 2 drives in raid0, for months with no problems, tonight...i upgraded my CPU....restarted, bios beep fine so cpu ok...and then my raid fell flat on its face, complete controller error and failure, as i type i am re-installing on a single raptor and that will do me for now, at least its a little more stable!!! lol..i guess your gonna have to take the risk or not!!!! if ya ask me at thismoment in time...stick to single drives

Dec

[Malpine Walis]

I am really sorry to hear that Dec. However, remember the old saying about falling off a horse. If you don't get right back on, you may never do so again.

Realistically, I pretty much never recommend that people use RAID level 0. One blip and your data is all gone. Faster than you could ever hope to get your documents ans saved games onto a thumb drive.

Now the specific failure that you had sounds like user error to me. By any chance, were you overclocked when you pulled the old proc? While your hardware should be capable of that move, you do well to remember that “should” is a word that leaves room for “can't”. Remember that level 0 has no tolerance whatsoever for “can't”.

Before I ever make any hardware changes, I always drop back to stock (or even a bit lower) just to make sure that everything works. Then when it is all working fine, I will redo my OC just in case.

Down the road, you might also want to consider getting another drive and trying level 5. Right now, the one that you use is $182 shipped from newegg. I make no promise that user error will not toast the controller on a level 5 array but when you do have a failure, if you use the software on the UBCD, you should be able to tell which drive has failed. It is something of a PIA to rebuild a level 5 array but it can be done.