View Full Version : 4 drive raid stripe to much?
SpaceRangerJoe
05-25-02, 03:21 PM
im going to be building a new computer soon, cause the laptop just doesnt cut it. i was thinking about doing a 4 drive raid 0. i would probably be using four 40gig ibm drives, but im not set on the brand. i dont really need 160 gigs of space, but i want something fast. im sure it would be fast when i have to deal with very large files, but would it be a waste for most normal usage? what do you guys think? i was thinking that the seek times for normal files would be excessive if it had to search all those drives.
Welcome to the Forums, Space Ranger Joe!
What are you going to be doing with this rig that you would need a four drive RAID 0 setup? You really don't need that sort of thing if you're just going to be playing games and surfing teh intarwebnet. If you're doing video, maybe, but even then, a dual drive RAID 0 should do well for you.
One thing you may want to consider is a RAID 0 + 1, requiring a total of 5 drives. Four striped, and one mirrored, in the event you lose a drive, you still have a backup. But at that point, you may as well do RAID 5.
Check out http://www.raid.com/04_00.html to find out what sort of RAID arrays are available, and what they do.
nikhsub1
05-25-02, 07:10 PM
Originally posted by Wa11y
Welcome to the Forums, Space Ranger Joe!
One thing you may want to consider is a RAID 0 + 1, requiring a total of 5 drives. Four striped, and one mirrored, in the event you lose a drive, you still have a backup. But at that point, you may as well do RAID 5.
Raid 0+1 requires only 4 drives, not 5. Basically it stripes to 2 drives and the other 2 stripes are mirror copies, slower for writing than raid0, a bit faster at reading.
Originally posted by nikhsub1
Raid 0+1 requires only 4 drives, not 5. Basically it stripes to 2 drives and the other 2 stripes are mirror copies, slower for writing than raid0, a bit faster at reading.
Okay, seems I'm not to sure what RAID 0 is for. My understanding is that you've got four drives, a, b, c and d. And we'll throw in a fifth, e. Now, a, b, c, and d are all striped together, to make RAID array 1. Assuming a, b, c and d are all 40GB hard drives, wouldn't Array 1 be a total of 40GB, since it's striping the data to all four drives? And drive e goes in mirrored, so that an exact copy of Array 1 is on drive e, but without the striping, in the even any drive in Array 1 goes bad? That's how I understood striping and mirroring. If I'm wrong feel free to correct me.
Which is also why I posted that link, instead of just giving my answer, and being wrong.
Basically, RAID-0 is 2 drives or more drives with data striped across all of the drives. There is no parity system or any other from of data redundancy, so if the data on a single drive is lost, the data on all drives goes away. It does generally give better read and writes versus all other RAID and single drive systems at the expense of data protection. In your example with 4 drives, it'll be 160 GB of storage, since you can stripe data across all 4 drives(possibly not with all controllers). RAID-0 does not have any mirroring component so drive e would not be viable. RAID-4 is probably closest to what you were thinking of, but is probably slower and more expensive than RAID-5. The most commonly used levels are 0 for home use, and 1 and 5 for business and server use.
nikhsub1
05-25-02, 09:17 PM
Originally posted by Wa11y
Okay, seems I'm not to sure what RAID 0 is for. My understanding is that you've got four drives, a, b, c and d. And we'll throw in a fifth, e. Now, a, b, c, and d are all striped together, to make RAID array 1. Assuming a, b, c and d are all 40GB hard drives, wouldn't Array 1 be a total of 40GB, since it's striping the data to all four drives? And drive e goes in mirrored, so that an exact copy of Array 1 is on drive e, but without the striping, in the even any drive in Array 1 goes bad? That's how I understood striping and mirroring. If I'm wrong feel free to correct me.
Which is also why I posted that link, instead of just giving my answer, and being wrong.
I think you are confused. First in striping, you multiply the number of drives times the size of the drives, assuming they are all the same size. So, 4 40 GIG drives in a striped array will yeild 160GB. Raid0 is striping, across 2- 8 drives, no redundency, 2 drives is the most common. Raid0+1 is striping across 2 drives like raid0 but you have 2 other drives MIRRORING the 2 striped drives. Write times are somewhat slower than raid0 due to the fact that the system has to write the data twice, one to the 2 main drives then 2 to the mirroring drives. What you are saying (I think) is that you can stripe with 4 drives in raid0, then have 1 drive mirror the whole array. This is not possible, at least with an ATA raid array, it MAYBE in SCSI but I'm not sure. I hope I have made sense!
Originally posted by nikhsub1
I hope I have made sense!
Quite a bit, actually. That explained it very well. No confusion here.
RangerJoe
05-26-02, 01:58 PM
space is my brother, and to my understanding, he wont be doing much else besides gaming...and surfing...so do you all think that a 2 or 3 raid 0 would be good
Originally posted by RangerJoe
space is my brother, and to my understanding, he wont be doing much else besides gaming...and surfing...so do you all think that a 2 or 3 raid 0 would be good
No, I think ANY sort of RAID would be overkill. The performance gains, or so I understand, are negligable unless you're moving large chunks of data, such as video editing. For gaming, just go with one hard drive.
donny_paycheck
05-26-02, 04:13 PM
I'd recommend a 2-drive RAID 0 stripe. The performance gains you will notice with that will be noticed right away and easily so. Overall performance is usually about 80% better than a single drive of the same type that the array is made up of. Running more than a pair of drives isn't much of a difference after that though. For the greatest realization of performance, go from a single drive to two in RAID level 0.
For more information click here (http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html).
SpaceRangerJoe
05-26-02, 05:00 PM
i do plan on doing more than just gaming and surfing, just to show how much my brother knows about me (just giving you a hard time man). i do plan on doing some video stuff this summer, and more important than that, im very impatient with computers. when i click on something, i want it to go. and i dont like waiting for files to copy/move or whatever. and it would be fun to say i have raid. it would be a new experience for me.
FireMogle
05-26-02, 07:30 PM
Personally I would say if you want to spend the money then go for it. If you dont need that much space smaller drives can be used. At this moment I am looking at getting a 4+ SCSI RAID system going, sure, its way overkill, but I will have plenty of headroom when that time comes. My 2 Drive 7200 RPM array is noticebly slower than my UW 10K, so the performance gain can be noticed in everyday situations. All in all, I would say that price would be the biggest issue in the decision, Speed/Headroom/Overkill vs. Price.
donny_paycheck
05-26-02, 08:06 PM
Originally posted by SpaceRangerJoe
i do plan on doing more than just gaming and surfing, just to show how much my brother knows about me (just giving you a hard time man). i do plan on doing some video stuff this summer, and more important than that, im very impatient with computers. when i click on something, i want it to go. and i dont like waiting for files to copy/move or whatever. and it would be fun to say i have raid. it would be a new experience for me.
First of all, I forgot to welcome you to the forums!
What type of system are you planning to build? AMD or Intel? Do you have an idea of what chipset or motherboard you would like to use? I recommend paying the minimum amount and getting a motherboard with an onboard 2-channel ATA133 RAID controller and running a level 0 stripe.
SpaceRangerJoe
05-27-02, 10:17 AM
Im planning on an AMD system. I will probably be using an XP1800. I think ill wait till the 64bit chips come out, cause im sure all amd's other chips will go drop in price a ton after that happens. for the mobo, i want to get an epox, with the new 333 chipset. i think its the 8K3A+ revision 1.2, but im to lazy to go look it up right now. It's the same board my brother has i think. then no less than 512 ram, im thinking 2700 corsair xms. its open to changes, but im considering something like that.
Azzkiller
05-27-02, 01:47 PM
Dude, I did not know you were posting on OC. Anyways, newegg has the ECS KT333 board for 77 dollars and it has built in raid. That would probably be a nice board, grant has the cheap ecsk7s5a board only 50 bux and it works great, that board should be awesome. Anyways, the more drives that you add to a RAID 0 array the faster it will be so 4 drives isnt too much. But you gotta factor in price. 4 drives is gonna cost you at least 300 dollars. But it will be insanely fast. IMHO the best value is 80gig 7200rpm drives as you can get them for 93 dollars apiece IBM deskstar. You could start off with 2 80 gig 7200rpm and then later upgrade to another two. That would be a redicouslous amount of storage over 300 gigabytes, but you could store our entire movie night movie collection.
P.S. Just in case you didnt know this is Jerry.
SpaceRangerJoe
05-27-02, 03:04 PM
yeah, i read the forums on a fairly regular basis, i just dont usually post much. if i did a 4 drive raid, then i would not be using 80 gig drives. thats just extreme. the speed of 4 drives would be nice sometimes, but it would be a waste for most of the stuff i do. i mean, anything has got to be faster then the 4200rpm beast in this laptop. as for the mobo, i think ill just spend a little extra cash, cause i like the epox. and if i decide i want to get adventurous and do that water cooling, then i know that epox board can go fast.
FireMogle
05-27-02, 03:31 PM
Note, some on board RAID have only a 2 drive limit, ie no more than 2 drives in raid. I dont know about that board though, but you may want to look into that more deeply before the money is spent.
RangerJoe
05-27-02, 06:32 PM
the board supports 4 drives in raid 0, 1, and 0 + 1
donny_paycheck
05-27-02, 07:09 PM
Originally posted by RangerJoe
the board supports 4 drives in raid 0, 1, and 0 + 1
What does it have for an onboard controller? Most onboard RAID chips support 4 drives but only have 2 channels. This is why I am asking.
And SpaceRangerJoe, the XP 1800+ will be a pretty outdated CPU by the time that the clawhammer Athlon XPs hit the streets. I would either get one sooner or get something better when the clawhammers arrive. When they do the inexpensive CPU will most likely be a Barton-cored Athlon XP. These will be the ones with a .13 micron die size and 512kb of L2 cache. If I were you, I wouldn't plan ahead quite so far. I think when the time comes a lowly XP 1800+, even a Barton core, will be far below what you'll be able to afford. Matter of fact I don't think they'll even make a 1800+ Barton XP because they'll be well toward the 3000+ speeds if it keeps going as it is now. This is just a guess though and yours is as good as mine. Just don't plan on anything concrete so far in the future because things can dramatically change in the computer industry in a short time.
Crash893
05-27-02, 07:31 PM
Originally posted by SpaceRangerJoe
i do plan on doing more than just gaming and surfing, just to show how much my brother knows about me (just giving you a hard time man). i do plan on doing some video stuff this summer, and more important than that, im very impatient with computers. when i click on something, i want it to go. and i dont like waiting for files to copy/move or whatever. and it would be fun to say i have raid. it would be a new experience for me.
I would do a simple raid-0 with two of the drives
leave the other 2 for pure storage
then get as much ram as allowed by law into my mother board and make it into a ram drive
then i would load what ever program i need on the raid drive
and put the large file on the ram drive
RangerJoe
05-27-02, 09:39 PM
the 8k3a+ has two channels, but just like any other ide channel, supports two drives...it uses the highpoint HPT372 chip
nikhsub1
05-27-02, 10:39 PM
The only way to do a 4 drive raid0 is with 4 channels! It would be slow with 4 drives on 2 channels, probably slower than 2 drives cause each slave would be waiting to share the channel. Promise makes a TX4, 4 channel raid card but I don't know if they make it in ATA133 yet. I would never use onboard raid either, not that it is slower but it is not portable.
RangerJoe
05-27-02, 11:35 PM
my 20 gb drive is just as fast as my 40 gb drive, and the 20 is the slave....there is prolly a different way to set up a 4 drive raid 0 then just plugging it in..i dont know though, casue ive never done it
SpaceRangerJoe
05-28-02, 12:51 AM
im not planning to far in the future for this computer. im just need to bank a couple weeks of paycheck. i could have all the cash in a month, but i waste to much, haha. but at the latest, ill be building this computer end of the summer. the reason i was planning on an xp chip like that, is cause i know i can oc it without to much trouble, and especially after the 64bit chips are out, they will cost nothing. that saved money will go right into more ram and a better video card. but then again, ill just have to see how things look in a month or so.
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