Is RAID 0 worth it

R.Rabbit said:

im really getting interrested in raid0 from reading this thread, i didnt think the performance boost was that great, the worst part of my computer(even though i have a wd80gigSE) is my load times seem to take forever and i have a short attention span so its terrible,
n e ways whats a good quality/good price raid card? im on a pretty tight budget

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I can't speak for anything except the Promise RAID controller cards. Look up the TX2000 series. I know I wouldn't recommend anything from High Point Technologies. I'm sure there must be other good brands though.

Cheers,
Mike

is raid 0 on 2 80GB WD 7200 8MBbuffer hard drives better than having an 18.6GB 15krpm scsi drive (for system files and games)with a backup 7200rpm hdd for music and movies?

i think i know the answer, scsi will be faster...

but raid 0 sounds like it would be easier and cheaper to setup.

Actually the RAID would be a little faster except for the seek times. Although some peeps mite would disagree with this.

Mike

ok, this is probly a really stupid question, but you need identical hard drives to run a RAID 0 array, right?

Mr. Tom said:

ok, this is probly a really stupid question, but you need identical hard drives to run a RAID 0 array, right?

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Not mandatory but much better if they are the same.

Mr. Tom said:

ok, this is probly a really stupid question, but you need identical hard drives to run a RAID 0 array, right?

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actually, no you don't. but you will lose some of the benefits of setting up a raid 0 array. for example, if you have 2 hard drives, a 60 GB with 2 mb cache @ 5400 rpm and an 80 GB with 8 MB cache @ 7200 rpm, when put into a raid array, the speed of the array will only be as fast as the slowest drive. so both drives would use 60 GB each (total of 120, wasting 20 GB), act like 2 MB cache drives, and would run like 2 - 5400 drives. (basically wasting the extra hard drive space, cache, and faster rpm speed)

My motherboard has an HPT374 raid controller on it (4 IDE connectors, 6 in total on mobo). It works great. It's a 16k array, that uses a bit more of my precious cpu cycles, but that's ok.
I preferred using identical HDD's, you never know.
Didn't really notice a big improvement in Windows, except when transferring very large files. However loading times when gaming went down!

Would that be the Promise Fasttrack TX2000? http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...=11&manufactory=1119&DEPA=1&sortby=14&order=1

Mr. Tom said:

ok, this is probly a really stupid question, but you need identical hard drives to run a RAID 0 array, right?

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Not manditory, but read this:

RAID 0 is for performance. Files are divided up between your disks so that data can be read from each concurrently and therefore be almost twice as fast (though it will never reach double due to overhead). Your operating system will see the array as a single disk with the capacity of double the smallest disk (if you are using two disks--if you use 3 or four then the capacity will be treble or quadruple the smallest disk, respectively). The performance will be limited by the slowest disk in the array. If any one disk in a RAID 0 fails, ALL DATA IS LOST.

RAID 1 is for fault tolerence. Basically limited to even numbers of disks, this is essentially mirroring. Data is written/erased to each pair concurrently. If one disk fails, an exact copy is always present to take over seamlessly. The controller will enable you to replace the failed disk and re-mirror it to the remaining one at your convenience. Of course, if both disks fail at the same time, or the second one fails before you replace the first failed disk, you are SOL. The O/S will see a RAID 1 as a single disk of a size of the smallest disk and the array will perform only as fast as its slowest disk.

The other versions of RAID are something of combinations of RAID 0 and RAID 1 with some checksum programming thrown in.

Welcome to the forums!

Mike360000 said:

I can't speak for anything except the Promise RAID controller cards. Look up the TX2000 series. I know I wouldn't recommend anything from High Point Technologies. I'm sure there must be other good brands though.

Cheers,
Mike

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from what i read on the PROMISE FASTTRAK TX2000, its only a software raid controller, and mbentley says that software controllers will only degrade performance, im confused? i know i cant afford a hardware controller card so is the PROMISE FASTTRAK TX2000 really an increase over a single IDE setup?

R.Rabbit said:

from what i read on the PROMISE FASTTRAK TX2000, its only a software raid controller, and mbentley says that software controllers will only degrade performance, im confused? i know i cant afford a hardware controller card so is the PROMISE FASTTRAK TX2000 really an increase over a single IDE setup?

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It's more accurate to describe it as a firmware controller. There is some pre-cooked code in the silicon that handles RAID duties, even though some of the required processing is still offloaded to the CPU.

Software controllers are OS-only programs that handle all RAID duties. This is more CPU/system intensive and may be less advantageous depending on how badly you need disk performance and CPU cycles.

The best hardware controllers have a dedicated processing unit onboard as well as a cache memory of several Mb's. These are quite expensive though, and rare in the IDE arena (though 3Ware makes a few). Though the theoretical advantage over firmware devices seems large, in practice it's not so clear. CPU usage will go down of course, but RAID duties themselves are only handled better sporadically.

I'd say that a firware controller is a fine choice that will deliver the disk benefits you seek, without incurring worrying CPU costs. So yes- the controller is better than a single IDE controller, at the small cost of some CPU cycles (nothing excessive, again, and the IDE controller is also a firmware device already).

Does the hard drive size make any different to the RAID array (i.e. Will two identical 40GBs be faster than two Identical 200GBs)?

Well I've used Raid 0 almost eversince it was out. back when 20 gig drives were as big as they come, putting two 20gigs together was fine. but now sacrificing a $140 120+ gig drive for some gain in performance is kind of heavy on the wallet.

From my experience using raid, i must say that the performance increase is about double. but not all the time. mainly HD intensive operations only. of course those beautiful moments come very often if you're a gamer

Really, besides hardcore gamers, I don't see why one should even care about non-mainstreem stuff. It's kind of like if you don't race your car or is a spirited driver, who cares about having 450hp as oppose to 250hp

A moderate opinion on an extreame overclocking site, plenty of Irony in there

Re: BACKUP

paupton said:

DITTO ...,,, and who among us has ever heard of too much hard drive space? LOL Get it and try it out.
Luck

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"Too Much" What's that? For SpaceRangerJoe and I, "too much" == almost enough

Honestly, RAID 0 is great. Most "enthauist" motherboards have onboard RAID already. As long as you have reliable disks (i.e. - like NOT two 60GXPS as in my old array, which both failed at sepreate times), it's just cheap speed, baby!

Have you ever opened up a MB+ word file on an average system, RAID makes all the difference. It helps remove all the load time of that file and before I put raid in...the entire system slows down when Word tries to auto-save. Doesn't happen anymore.

I would personally get the Adaptec 1200A if you were going to get a raid card. Its about 60 bucks so it wont break the bank and with Adaptec you know your getting quality.

i agree with toasted on the first page , second post.

Big files great, small files..not so great.

Seek times may actually be greater with raid and ide, transfer rates are somewhat exponential with file size to max transfer rate.

You want speed, get scsi. put games and OS on it...drop all other crap on a ide drive.

I got the kuetech pir133a from newegg for 33.00.Iy comes with a five year warranty.It is based on the silcon image 680 chip.it's fast,very fast.It reads and writes on average of 80 mbs.Along with my 8rda it is as fast as you can get for the money spent.I have noticed advantages over the hp raid on my old kt7ar,it has its own irq.
If you use alot of small files then use a small stripe size and vice versa or take the middle ground and use 32k.I am usin 64k stripe size and photoshop changes are almost instatanious.It also rips video files in the half the time of a single drive.
I would never consider building a computer for myself without it!

The one thing I like about IDE RAID, especially serial ATA is that the bus is a star topology, not shared like SCSI. This means that the bus be no faster than the individual drives. Each drive has a dedicated path to transfer data and doesn't require any arbitration delays. It's got to be cheaper to build and has some pretty good advantages over SCSI. I'll be very surprised if SATA doesn't start chipping away market share from SCSI.

Now all we need it to start seeing PCI-X on regular desktop motherboards.