Kt7a-raid: Is Striping Worth It??

BEEN TOYING WITH THE IDEA OF TRYING STRIPING.
IS THE PERFORMANCE INCREASE REALLY NOTICABLE?
RUNNING A T-BIRD 1.4 AT 1.6. PRETTY HAPPY WITH PERFORMANCE, BUT OF COURSE WANT MORE!!
USING A WD13.6BA (ATA-66) HARDDRIVE. ANYONE HAVE ANOTHER ONE AVAILABLE? IS IT CRITICAL THAT THE HD'S MATCH PERFECTLY
AS MENTIONED IN THE MANUAL? CAN'T FIND IN THE MESSAGE BOARDS WHERE STRIPING IS BEING DISCUSSED.

THANKS FOR THE HELP.

It's important that the HD match but it'll work even if they dont match. You will be limited to double the capacity of the smaller drive;

10G (RAID0) 40G = 20G & 20G lost

20G (RAID0) 20G = 40G

same goes with the speed of your hard drive



PS you just might get better replys to your thread if it werent in all caps. Looks like your shouting & demanding an answer

sorry for the caps

It"s just sooo much easier for me to type in caps. Since I don't
keyboard, just hunt and peck. I know,sounds like a personal problem!!

Still looking ofr some good feedback on wether or not striping is worth it. is this the only place in the forums that raiding is discussed?

Thanks

Striping is not worth it. HDs increase performance so fast that a striped system will be outperformed by a single drive system within a couple months. Plus, HD performace is more dependant on HD platter density than anything, and most people have a tendancy to get two smaller drives rather than one large. Smaller drives are (usually) older and (usually) have a smaller platter density, therefore their performance isn't as good. I won't even bother mentioning that striping doubles your chance of data failure, and HD speed doesn't impact game performance anyhow. (oops I just did) On top of all that are possible driver issues and installation headaches.....

Couple this together with the fact that the RAID controller runs on the PCI bus while the onboard IDE runs on the V-Link architecture. (not shared) The PCI bus is exceptionally hogged on these 266A boards, especially with all the latency problems. ( www.viahardware.com - see "PCI Latency Patch")

Go buy a big harddrive with a big buffer and don't worry about it. It has a good chance of being faster anyhow.

Can't wait for some people to flame this to defend their purchase.

P.S. Stripping isn't worth it either. You'll only de-moralize yourself. Don't trade your long term mental health for short term financial independence. Besides, most strippers are ugly anyhow.

So why stripe?

for the average user/gamer, no it's not worth it. you dont use your hard drive as much as you might think for things like gaming or browsing the net or whatnot.

it might be worth it if you did a lot of LARGE file work, like run servers, video editing computers, etc. but other than the few exceptions which the common hobbyist wont be into, nope, you're better off using raid 1 to mirror your hard drives in case one goes bad.

if you want better performance, you are better off upgrading other components, like memory (if you dont have much) or processor (if yours is slow). granted, your current hard drive is pretty old, so you would probably benefit most from a new hard drive, but in your case I dont think another 13GB drive in raid0 would be as good as a new 60GB drive.

also, not flaming you, but cheerfully disagreeing, truckchase

one new drive wont outperform a pair of raid0 hard drives that are 2 months old. raid0 still has it's performance benefit, at the higher risk of failure (two drives = double chance one will die).

altho I do agree with you in that it's not really worth it (for most people).