Anand says JUST SAY NO to RAID0

[JKeefe]

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

Interesting. Despite the benchmark results, however, I definitely notice that my system with RAID0 doesn't have that split second lag that it did before I got Raptors.

Everyone loves SATA RAID0. I don't see lots of people complaining that it did nothing for them. What's the explanation for the difference between everyone's opinion and these benchmarks?

 

[sramjones]

http://team-bau.net/Raptors/

lok at those bench marks I used to get 20 mbs with my old 5400 rpm drive now I get close to 86

please i love my raptors

 

[Showstoppermd]

I just installed the exact setup with 2 74GB Raptors in a RAID 0 setup and i love it. Maybe just using one drive would have sufficed on the performance side but i have onboard raid and i wanted around 150GB total drive space so i'm still happy with the performance. Its a huge difference from the WD caviar 120GB SE that I was running prior to this upgrade. Moved that one to the my server.

Show

 

[LtBlue14]

OT: showstoppermd, you can't get your mushkin level II 3500 to do 226mhz? 5:4 would give you 283:226. you might want to loosen up your timings some for all the extra bandwidth.

As for the topic: i find people are more in love with the idea of RAID than their performance gains from it (unless of course they actually need the bandwidth). i find this to be a good read on the subject as well: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0

 

[Biasos]

Are most people comparing the feeling of their Raptor Raid-0 vs a single Raptor or their Raptor Raid-0 vs a single older, slower drive?

 

[Randyman...]

I had a RIAD0 set up for a while. Yes, it is fast. The queston becomes, it the approx 50% bandwidth increase worth taking a chance of ONE drive failing to loose ALL of the RAID data? At least if you had the 2 drives "Split", and a drive fails, you only loose one drive worth of data.

That was my main reason, and I get the needed 30 Tracks of 24Bit 44.1KHz audio at once from a standard 7200RPM ATA drive w/o RAID 0. Instead of RAID1, I just do a weekly B/U of important data to another local drive (Audio Projects, etc).

I do have a Raptor 36Gig for my System drive, and it is as fast as I will ever need for an OS drive W/O raid...

RAID also seems to slightly lower seek times.

At work (Fox Sports Net), we use RAID5 for the TEN 1.5TB Pinnacle on-air video servers. This is dual purpose to allow SIXTEEN simultaneous 4:2:2 SDI outputs and 4 SIMULTANEOUS 4:2:2 SDI encoders PER SERVER - AND have the ability to loose a drive with no ill effects! That is where RAID earns its keep IMO... It really is a "Semi-Pro" thing with the ICH5R and Promise RAID controllers. Not at all the same as a full blown "Application Critical" RAID5 SCSI set-up... Time and advances in SATA might change that soon?

Later

 

[tomchong]

well, im not desputing the facts put fourth in that article, but i see i little bit of bias in it. first, they use that fastest sata drive on the market, which is often capable of using the full bandwidth of the sata bus on its own, and no other raid arrays to compare. they failed to mention the advantage when accessing LARGE files and the fact that splitting data evenly between two drives keeps access times down.

 

[dwalker]

Just say no to RAID0 - not me!

I routinely (twice weekly) transfer >15,000 jpegs from one partition to another on my 2 74gb WD RAID 0 setup. It now takes only 6 minutes where before it took 12 minutes with 2 7200rpm IDE WD drives on RAID0. In fact, without RAID0, it took nearly 20 minutes to complete the task.
Bottom line, RAID0 is fantastic if you need to fast HD access.
If you're talking about accessing a small file from RAID0 with a large amount of cache then you may not see a whole lot of difference. But, overall, RAID0 simply makes your system fast!

 

[Foxie3a]

Yeah, get RAID if you NEED fast HD access. But who NEEDS that? If you want to spend money on performance, then go right ahead.

I think that people should worry more on having more RAM, and higher quality componants, than having hard drives in RAID.

 

[sramjones]

ya know. If the only real problem with raid 0 is lack of redundancy and price. I say its for the peoiple who can afford it. and its called Backing up out data