To stripe or not to stripe.

[Mediawaves]

I'm going to have 5-7 80 gig 72000 western Digitals in my new rig, I have never been into stripping, would I have any advantages using it? Oh, my rig will constantly being used for animation and video rendering. maybe a game or two, never the net.

 

[Blueacid]

Striping will certainly improve the performance anywhere, and for what you suggest (huge AVI files from video rendering), a RAID array would be perfect...

Having said that, please bear in mind that in a Raid 0 array, if one drive fails, then you lose EVERY SINGLE BIT OF DATA on that array... no joke - Gandalf here had a problem with that a while back, and data recovery is not funny....


Since i'm not a raid guru, I can't suggest anything apart from to have a read around http://www.raidweb.com/whatis.html <=there, and use that site to help you make a choice...


Sorry about the non-helpful post, but it's a step in the right direction

 

[Sonny]

Yup but not all the drives as with the regular RAID Controllers you have on MoBos or less than $500 64BIT True Hardware RAID Cards, when you use more than 2 you will see a drop in performance. Stripe 2 that you will be using as a temp working space & keep the OS on another partition & the rest for storage.

 

[attack]

What I like to do if you got the drives is run 2 striping arrays and use WINXP's backup to backup your one drive at night. This way it's like a 1/0 array only you don't take the hit in performance of the mirroring (which is half the write speeds...read speeds are the same though).

 

[Sonny]

Have you done 2 arrays with one controller?

 

[attack]

yeah my 404 controller I do this with, each drive on it's own channel, awsesome too because you can put your SWAP files on the second array which is nice for performance in large games/multitasking.

 

[JigPu]

Yup but not all the drives as with the regular RAID Controllers you have on MoBos or less than $500 64BIT True Hardware RAID Cards, when you use more than 2 you will see a drop in performance.

...

Really? I've never done a RAID so I wouldn't know, but why does that happen? Is it bandwith saturation, or because it takes it longer to figure out which drive to put it on, or something else?

I've allways wanted to see what 4+ HDs in Raid 0 would do, but now you've gone and shot down my expectaitons
JigPu

 

[Sonny]

yeah my 404 controller I do this with, each drive on it's own channel, awsesome too because you can put your SWAP files on the second array which is nice for performance in large games/multitasking.

Your certain about that? The RR404 isn't capable of 2 different arrays AFAIK. Did you do this with a new BIOS?

Really? I've never done a RAID so I wouldn't know, but why does that happen? Is it bandwith saturation, or because it takes it longer to figure out which drive to put it on, or something else?

I've allways wanted to see what 4+ HDs in Raid 0 would do, but now you've gone and shot down my expectaitons
JigPu

Its really because all the cheap RAID systems are all software RAID. True Hardware RAID Cards don't have issues with this as much.

 

[Mediawaves]

Well this is an abundance of unexpected information. I will use the link and research on my own to find the answers you all seem to already know. Thanks very much.

 

[attack]

Very certain, I'm running this as we speak, two RAID 0 on 4 HDD's on he 404 controller. Yes I'm using the latest BIOS, I flashed it to it first thing so I never tried the older ones.

As for the 4 drives...yeah I was quite dissapointed when I tested this, I wasn't going to run 4 drives in 0 because of the odds of failure....I was upset to see that the results were identicle to the drive RAID 0

 

[Nebby]

of course, once you get into scsi....more than two certainly give better results

 

[fiji]

you could go with raid 0 + 1 ...

 

[Mediawaves]

As I supposed it would- this has created more confusion than answered my question, leaving me only with more questions.

I began using RAID PCI cards as a way of adding more devices. They were cheap RAID cards. Will these cheap RAID cards do what you guys are talking aboutor are we talking the real $3-400 ones?

 

[Mediawaves]

RAID isn't the controller cards, it's the software???
Am I getting closer?

 

[fiji]

theres both, raid software and hardware

the software is obviously slower though...

 

[Mediawaves]

I think one is made by I/O Magic, the other is a Promise, like I said cheapo ones. Can you direct me to "How to tutorials"?