Raid or no?

I just got done upgrading some pcs in the family and i will be getting some of my stuff back he he. its kinda nice to get back items, feels like christmas ^^;;
Dilema though;

I have three hard drives now: Two Seagate ST380011A 80 gb hard drives *8mb, 8.5ms 7200.7rpm ata 100* and One Seagate ST3200822A 200gb Hard drive *8mb 8.5ms 7200.7rpm ata 100*.

Im using the 200 gb as my main drive now, one of the 80's is in my file server right now. What im thinking is trying out the anyraid feature on this Neo2. theoreticly, it will let you raid parallal or serial drives of your choice.
Would there be any noticable performence improvment with a 2x80gb pata raid-0?
im not really looking to get raptor level performence here, but anything that will make this main pc a little zippier.
Its already damn fast as it is. just curious more than anything.

Your read/write times would be better.
howver, your mean time to failure would be 2x higher.
if the 80's are storage drives, i would say RAID 0 is not what you want.
If you access programs from the 80's that is a different story

Would there be any noticable performence improvment with a 2x80gb pata raid-0?

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No.

If I were in that situation, I would actually try to put the RAID 0 setup in the server, if other people besides you try to acess it. But I am not quite sure off hand if the Gigabyte GA-7N400L supports PATA raid. Also depending what you do, but may not be helpful/safe to use in your main rig (not 'safe' to use it in a server either, but oh well...)

Otherwise, try it out and report results!

I use 2 80GB SATAII drives and get 250MBs with a 1MB file off RAID 0, 190MBs off SATA1 PATA RAID 0 with 2 80GB Seagates was 90MBs steady. I did my testing with 1MB files and used a HD meter, forget the name. It was off a Max PC CD so I'm sure it's fairly legit

I take the risk of loosing everything but all I care about are my docs. It would suck to loose everything I downloaded, but it's not like I can't find it again I'll take the massive performance increase and short load times over the risk.

I would say no, and mindaugas, 250mb/s I don't actualy believe...maybe burst speeds, but I've seen 2 and 4 disk 15k SCSI U320 RAID 0 setups top at around 225mb/s and 74gb raptors at 150-160mb/s (not limit by the 133mb/s PCI bus limit which most RAID controllers have).

RAID 0 has slower access times than single drives and increase the rate of drive failure, and you have the added increase of controller failure...which could either corrupt your array, or at the very least be an incredible pain in the arse.

The small benefit of increased bandwidth isn't enough for me to run it on any configs.

ajrettke said:

I would say no, and mindaugas, 250mb/s I don't actualy believe...maybe burst speeds,

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Sorry, yes on burst rate.

thats pretty much what i was thinking. the single 200 gb is pretty damn fast as it is, and no, the server doesnt have onboard raid. if anything, i could set up a raid 1 on that machine... which i have been thinking of doing.
converting my athlon 64 into the server and my mobile athlon xp back to my main desktop rig. i just need enough power to do graphic design and some games... sot he 64 is chugging away for nothing really.

I don't know though, because people with similiar setups at a LAN I was just at were using single drives and I was loading BF2 a minute faster than them. Other games, and Windows of course load faster too. I'd have to do some more research to get down to the nitty gritty on RAID 0 but I'm sure it's faster than a single drive. Someone correct me on the technical side. So the access time is slower right? But with large buffers on the drive isn't that negated because of the technology built into SATA drives now? Maybe this is a new thread "The advantages of RAID 0" ?

Mindaugas, the built in buffers don't help RAID much, the problem is finding the data on the drive, NCQ or native command queing is starting to come into affect in SATA but it's benefits are minimal at best in it's current state. SCSI uses a much more advanced version (and that's a big part in why they're so much more expensive).
Raid 0 is faster than single drives when the files are contiguous (meaning all the parts are in a row)....if a drive is fragmented, it reads a little bit, then needs to seek again, then transfer a bit, then seek etc....now when seek times are in the ms...that's actualy a long time in the computer world...especialy when RAM access times are in ns!....meaning 3 orders of magnitude atleast in access speeds.

Games with large maps are often written contiguous if the drive was well defragmented before the install and the map file went on the same sequential spot. This is often the case for advanced users who know how to manage thier computers/OS.

For small files, such as textures and other things though RAID 0 takes a hit because it takes longer to find the files and the files are so small the added bandwidth of RAID 0 is negated.

Another pitfall of RAID 0 is were just now starting to goto onboard controllers for enthusiests which DO NOT put the controller on the PCI bus which has a max throughput for ALL devices on the bus to be 133mb/s! (raptors and SCSI are the only things which hit that mark on continuous throughput). With a 7.2k RAID 0 array through a PCI bus your being very limited...as you have a sound card, often a network card, and anything else which is just sending it's standard signals (small but can add up)...thus your 90-100mb.s RAID 0 array is capped at 70 or so, and the standard rate of 50-60 of a single drive with lower seeks turns out to be faster.

well put ajrettke, that really summed a lot of things up for me and answered a lot of questions.

if a drive is fragmented, it reads a little bit, then needs to seek again, then transfer a bit, then seek etc....

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This happens regardless if the drive is fragmented or not.

Awesome response, very informative

so the seek time is increased if using a RAID 0 array, or any array? Does this also effect SCSI drives, or does NCQ take care of that?

I'm not trying to argue ... BUT (monkey)

-Don't both drives in the array work in tandem? i.e. both look for the data at the same time, thereby decreasing the seek time, more heads searching is better(?)

Anyway here is a better look at it:

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=734&pageID=1211

It's nice to see some benches of what the drives can do. Looks like more everyday use doesn't see a huge imrpovement.

can you explain what raid is?

Read the sticky. http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=104802

RAID 0 80GB Hitachi SATAII drives:
sustained read 1MB file -->
250MBs on burst
110MBs no burst

SIngle SATAII Hitachi drive:
60MBs no burst
125MBs burst

Load times are slower, blah. This is off my rig in my sig. One of my drives was making some funny clicking noises so I took the RAID off and reloaded. I will definately be putting it back into a stripe as soon as I am sure the drive is ok or replaced. Just FYI everyone.

Seek times are increased because the data is split up and the way most controllers work is it waits for both drives to find the start of the stripe (any RAID set), once BOTH drives find the beginning then it transfers...so if you have 3 drives, the first 2 might have found the data but they can't send until the last one gets it.
Advanced controllers and NCQ might work around this, I'm not positive myself, but I do know most RAID 0 arrays take the hit...

For graphic design raid0 should be much faster.Raid drivers have come along way in the last few years.You have little to lose but time by trying it.I have an allmost identical system in my sons room with only two single drives, and even with the lower seek times it is much slower then mine.If you want your sytem to feel zippier,just try it.