velociraptor: to raid or not to raid?

[attack]

Codhein, hell yeah! It's good to have you here. I hope you stick around, you got some great info!

My 2 cents, I don't think it's worth buying 2 veloco's unless your already running the latest greatest other hardware (i.e. GPU, CPU etc). 600 bucks for 2 of those drives isn't worth it IMO. I would go with 3 or 4 7200 drives in RAID which would perform better overall, or just just 2 150gb raptors and save the cash and accept a very very small hit in performance.

RAID 0 has come a long way, seek times used to take a much bigger hit when RAID'd but now the difference is minimal.

The whole "feels faster" or other heurstics are worthless for arguments. Humans are probably the worst creatures on the planet at judging times objectively and accurately.
Read about cognitive biases here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Asking if it's worth it depends on your situation and expectations.

 

[ratbuddy]

The whole "feels faster" or other heurstics are worthless for arguments. Humans are probably the worst creatures on the planet at judging times objectively and accurately.
Read about cognitive biases here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Asking if it's worth it depends on your situation and expectations.

How is 'feels faster' not better than 'is faster but feels slower?'

We've all had days at work that were only say 4 hours but dragged on forever, and 12 hour days that flew by in no time. If it feels like things are loading faster, isn't that the same as them loading faster from the point of view of the person sitting there waiting for the game to finish loading?

 

[attack]

From a scientific standpoint, and the point of logical argument...no. I mean confirmation bias is a wonderful thing if you want to be ignorant, but if you want to be objective then theres no place.

I guess being aware of these biases makes me very skeptical, I prefer hard data over subjective feelings.

 

[tom10167]

Well I'm the most skeptic person alive and if I do something performance-wise(car, PC, stereo, whatever) I usually think I'm experiencing a placebo effect.


With the RAID I used a stopwatch though. It works.

 

[jokers_greg]

Well I'm the most skeptic person alive and if I do something performance-wise(car, PC, stereo, whatever) I usually think I'm experiencing a placebo effect.


With the RAID I used a stopwatch though. It works.

ditto,
I ALWAYS get the placebo effect, and the only way I know for sure, is to test it. "feel" doesn't do it for me...... most of the time

 

[tuskenraider]

I would go with 3 or 4 7200 drives in RAID which would perform better overall, or just just 2 150gb raptors and save the cash and accept a very very small hit in performance.

Unless you are purposefully utilizing high STR, how do you propose adding a third or fourth drive to be a wise move? Especially for the OP's use. Each drive added beyond the two you start with to make a RAID0 array will typically give diminishing returns. Do you feel if 2 must be great, 4 is better and 6 is even better than that? How do you decide to stop? Short of money and ports, of course.

RAID 0 has come a long way, seek times used to take a much bigger hit when RAID'd but now the difference is minimal.

Over what period of time do you base this on? I ask becuase I haven't seen much difference in the past five years I've been running RAID0, all with onboard mobo controllers. RAID0 has very little overhead and I haven't seen more than a .2 millisecond drop in average read time(I assume that's what you meant by seek time) going from a single drive to RAID0 over that time with a half dozen controllers or so.. What loses have you experienced?

 

[attack]

I use 3, I would use 4 but I ran out of space. Map loading for games is really my main concern, I leave my computer on and couldn't really care less about boot times. The number of drives does suffer from diminishing returns, don't forgot to add the increased array failure for something else consider. Obviously money and space/ports as well as the risk factors into ones decision, it's different for everyone. I personally would only goto 4 disks, after that is just more of a hassle and the returns aren't that great.
The main point in that argument was I believe you'd get much better performance with 3 or 4 7200 drives that cost less than 300 total, than you would with a single veloco. Now app dependant of course, but I think this would be wiser.


I've been running RIAD arrays for about 10 years, I dabbled even earlier but not enough to get any benchmarks done, it was done just to see if I could. Back when I was using old promise and silicon images controllers I was seeing a few ms increase (I truly can't remember, it was more than a few ms though).

 

[Blazing fire]

Also, Tusken,

If you want to continue playing devils advocate, try a couple of the things I mentioned earlier in the thread: regular every-day little things like opening a directory with 12GB of 630MB vid files and seeing how long it takes to generate thumbnails for them. Try opening a 6GB photoshop file...while running bit torrent, running a virus scan, and creating a drive image.

That's every-day? Oh my goodness, you must be nuts to run a virus scan EVERY DAY. Do you have 12GB of 630MB video files being uploaded into your computer every day? If so, you'll need 10TB of storage and, if not, you can only save 10sec for a 1-in a month app, then I don't see the need to.

 

[Blazing fire]

Knowing, though, that sometimes n00bs just want a simple answer to complex questions and they'll learn the rest as they go because they don't want to spend 3-months in "forum-school" before building their new rig, I'll try to give short responses to what I think are the right n00b questions to ask...

I did in fact spend a good 6 months in forums before building my computer.

 

[Stilletto]

Just to chime in here with my 2 cents.... I used to have one 150GB Raptor. I bought another to put into raid0 to maximize performance. It made absolutely no difference in the way my system ran or game loading times at all. I was tempted, as allot of people are, to "think" that my system was zippier or faster just to justify my extravagant purchase....I eneded up selling one of them. I now own a VelociRaptor, and it is far faster that the 2 raptors in raid 0. It's mostly in the access time, and you are not going to help that with raid 0.

P.S. And even if I had the extra 300 bucks, I would NOT raid another velociraptor because it would be a WASTE of money for extremely marginal gains, if any.