[microfire]

After just over 1 and a half years, I have now finally said goodbye to my raid0.

I was thinking this before all the talking started recently about raid0 and real world.

Yes somethings are not so fast like large file transfers, but other things are. Feels more smoother, and have notice that load bars move more consitantly. Slightly less cpu usage. There is less noise for sure, before the seek noise was terrible in raid0.

My drives are 7200 and orinigal 8mb seagate Sata. I think these may have been bad for raid0 arrays anyway. Tested two different type of raid controlers HDtach has a real ugly graph my drives (seen this in reviews as well), looked like the biggest earth quake is history, and minimum reads as low as 1mb.

My conclusion of it all is, its a give and take situation. You gain and lose with non raid and raid setups.


btw. In the bios, how can I set up my sata drives to work like sata. It appears the bios wants to configure these as single IDE in theory no matter what setting I choose, only operates as ture sata in the sata raid mode.
I would be thinking that this is normal way the ICH5R works, right?
Is there any optimal settings here?

[Sjaak]

Single Sata = IDE on the ICH5. thats where the 2 other channels come from

[microfire]

raid = ture sata 150 mode?

single sata drive - forced ide mode at 100?

So in single drive on the sata, I will be in theroy only be ata100 transfers?

[Sjaak]

Nono, that setting just defines how the controller sees the dries. Raid mode speaks for itself, IDE mode defines the controller so that each SATA connector is seen as a separate IDE channel, operating at SATA speed.

[microfire]

Good thanks.

Well, been using the single drive setup for the second day now.
I feel it is better, less delay feel like alot of the latency has gone and the choppyness.

[Sjaak]

h/f with it

ill stick to my raid for awhile

[sup3rcarrx8]

Heh. I would stick on to my Raid forever too except they keep dying on me every year or so and then my warranty is expired by that time. =/ (apprently i have bad luck with Maxtor)

edit: i am seriously not buying Maxtor drives after my three current ones die

[microfire]

I could say the same for seagate earlier on.
Though the 5 drives I own todays have been going perfectly since the beginning of 2003. I guess it just the luck of the draw.

With raid, the first thing people complain about is, wah wah if one of your drives fail then you loss all your data. Well get this if a single drives then you will loss all your data anyway. Big deal.

[Boomstick]

I was thinking of ditching my RAID0 also. It takes my PC 20-30 seconds to initialise the RAID controller and go through BIOS at startup but windows takes 5-10 seconds to show the desktop. So I think it would be quite a benefit for me to lose the RAID. I dont suppose there is anyway to ditch the RAID without a reinstall?

[microfire]

not really, unless you had a large spare harddrive you could borrow from a mate and then ghost it across.
Not sure how you go about removing the raid driver when the OS trys to boot, never tryed, it might work, im sure there be some type of solution that wouldn't be to hard to do.
A fresh install would be best. This time around, I am keeping my installed componants at a minimum. The amount of clutter I had before was slowing down my system badly, not to mention all the other BS that had infected my system. I had spyware that could not be deleted, and when deleted would right you different dirs and reinstall itself. In the last straw was when I removed a spyware manually and then it refused access to windows explorer, I could not longer manage my files with it crashing.
There is a time that will come where you realise just how bad everything is getting and will be a need to do a fresh format and reinstall, even if there isn't any spyware as such.
I have been using the single drive for a few days now. I can say not faster at loading and writing huge files quickly, but way better at smooth loading. I am sure the way the files are accessed, there has been a drastic improvment.
I did some reading on how the stripes work, and from what I gather no matter how you size it, you will win and lose depending on what its read/writing.

[theELVISCERATOR]

Originally Posted by Boomstick

I was thinking of ditching my RAID0 also. It takes my PC 20-30 seconds to initialise the RAID controller and go through BIOS at startup but windows takes 5-10 seconds to show the desktop. So I think it would be quite a benefit for me to lose the RAID. I dont suppose there is anyway to ditch the RAID without a reinstall?

Thats not right......on my ic7 raid initializes in like one second...

[sandman001]

Yea, mine flashes by fast enough that I only catch a small glimpse of it. Not even enough time to read the first word.

[apu318]

Originally Posted by microfire

Yes somethings are not so fast like large file transfers, but other things are. Feels more smoother, and have notice that load bars move more consitantly. Slightly less cpu usage.

i thought raid0 made things feel smoother.. like application launches are a bit zippier?

[Nagorak]

Originally Posted by microfire

With raid, the first thing people complain about is, wah wah if one of your drives fail then you loss all your data. Well get this if a single drives then you will loss all your data anyway. Big deal.

With two separate drives you can copy critical stuff over that you don't want to lose. With a RAID 0 setup, yes you do lose everything. In my opinion RAID 0 is not worth it in any way, shape, or form. I'll take the lower performance and two separate drives knowing that if I keep copies of stuff I need on both there's about a 1 in a million chance of them both dying simultaneously.

[microfire]

Still on single drives here.

Performance = +/-

Great thing about single drive is, a file only has to be accessed once when being read, and not eg. 512 times if it were a 8mb file into a 16k stripe.
Single drive cpu usage is more than 3 times lower, only 1.5% in my case.
Whatever is happening, there is something about the single drive that is making it feel better, in such a way I can notice the positives, I am without words to explain it.

There is no reason to change back to raid0.

[Sjaak]

Originally Posted by apu318

i thought raid0 made things feel smoother.. like application launches are a bit zippier?

In this topic there arent many enthousiasts about that, but in general it will help performance. read http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=310351 for more comments

[deathman20]

Most times it helps performance, sometimes it degrades it (very rarely though). Overall I had a raid setup one time, it was nice for copying large files from a smaller drive to that raid drive and such but overall thats what it was good for me.

Yes games load slightly faster on raid drives if they are larger based games that arn't depending on CPU power to decode files for the map to load up. There was an article on raid vs single drives somewhere. Semi recent too, im sure looking at that will give you a better feel of what the difference is in at least gaming applications.