a RAID issue

[iceman]

Hello all

I plan on buying an EPOX 8K7A. My question is, what the heck is RAID, and how do I know if i'm going to want to buy the 8K7A+ instead of the reg. 8K7A? Do either support a 1.33 GHZ T-Bird? I've looked at AMD's website, and I only see that they have approved the 8K7A up to a 1.2 GHZ T-Bird. Also, can I use DDR2400 ram with this board? I'd appreciate all replies on this. Sorry for my ignorance.
THANKS!!!

 

[JEFF]

raid,redundant array of inexpensive drives.yes really.raid 0 called striping is used for performance using two identical drives the mobo sees the array as 1 drive using the data from both simintaniously.
in very simple terms think of the drive as a record if you remember them.at cas 2 it takes two revolutions to retrive data from 1 drive.with raid it can retrive data from the array every revolution,
is it twice as fast?no. the real life gain is about 12 to 13 percent faster drive access.
is it worth it?..its your money!
this is way oversimplified but its just to give you an idea what it is.you also have more ide channels so you can have more drives for storage or for raid 1,which is two drives(or more)that are mirror images of each other.in this case the cpu reads and writes to these drives at the same clock cycle.it is baiscally for data security in case 1 drive fails you still have 1 readable drive left.a good backup is as good as this array and more cost effective if say you allready have a cd-rw or ghost drive.
ther was a good raid link on the front page about this that will give you more insight to the uses and performance gains using raid.

 

[ridge]

Performance using Raid depend on what benchmark
program your using.This includes real world and
synthetic benchmarks.The performance range
will very from 0 performance gain to 100 percent.
Also there the variables such as NTFS,Fat32,
ata100,66,33.
Here is a link to a Raid review,benchmarks etc..
It covers the Raid question pretty well.
Raid Link

 

[Nagorak]

The performance increase of RAID 0 is ridiculously small in almost all situations. If anything, RAID 0 is more of a novelty feature than anything really useful or important. You might see a small increase in performance but it's nothing that's going to make or break your PC's speed. Especially in games, expect no increase (any game that's swapping a lot to your hard drive is going to run like a dog anyway).

RAID 1 is somewhat more useful. Basically it mirrors the data onto two drives so that if one dies, the other still remains. I personally run a RAID 1 setup because I have important data that I don't want to lose.

HOWEVER, I strongly suggest you just buy the standard 8K7A board and then just buy an add-on RAID card if you decide you want it. An add-on PCI card can be used in ANY system you upgrade to in the future. It will also save you time and money later if you upgrade to another board that doesn't have built-in RAID (and have to buy an add-on PCI card anyway or abandon your setup).

 

[iceman]

Thanks guys!! I appreciate the help!! By the way, is the only reason to use RAID and have 2 harddrives, is to protect your data? From the responses, it seems like the performance factor isn't that much better, so thats the only other reason i can think of. What do you think?

 

[Nagorak]

iceman (Jul 04, 2001 09:38 p.m.):
Thanks guys!! I appreciate the help!! By the way, is the only reason to use RAID and have 2 harddrives, is to protect your data? From the responses, it seems like the performance factor isn't that much better, so thats the only other reason i can think of. What do you think?

In my opinion protecting your data is the only worthwhile reason. I just don't consider the small performance gains to be worth it. Also RAID 1 (mirroring) does have some performance increases too.

But I think you should read the review that was linked in someone's post above and make your own decision.

 

[Shadow ÒÓ]

I disagree with Nagorak on the amount of preformance you gain by using RAID 0. If I were to talk about benchmarks alone, my score in Sandra went from around 19,000 to 33,000 after running 2 disks in RAID 0. Now if I were to talk about real world differences, I could definitely see improvement. My 2k Server runs as fast as any 98 or ME machine I've had. Load times for the most processing intensive games (like UT) are even faster than those of 98 or ME machines. We have a lot of lan parties around here, and everyone that has seen my machine is extremely impressed. I think Dan would also agree with me as he was one of the first to brag about RAID in his machine.

here's a couple great pages that explain RAID at length.......

RAID.EDU: Interactive RAID Tutorial | RAID Levels Explained

Want to understand the differences between RAID system levels? Learn about the pros and cons of each level in this interactive RAID tutorial with JetStor.

www.acnc.com

and

http://www4.tomshardware.com/storage/00q1/000329/index.html

 

[JEFF]

i suppose i was not succenct in my previous reply.In my humble opinion i feel that the raid 0 is worth the extra money for the performance gain.however as the article above shows it really depends on the application you will be using.large file transfers like photo shop will see a significant increase in speed over office applications that use smaller files.
what the graphs do not show is differences in the block size because they only used 64k size.with smaller block size office apps would also see a performance gain allthough not as significant as the large files and cpu usage would be higher because of the calculations it would take to break the files into smaller blocks.this is not a problem however for the amd cpu.