Anyone tried RAid 0 x4?

[daction]

I'm thinking about purchasing a couple more harddrives and trying this out. I know it's risky and that would be a reason NOT to recommend it but other than that is it worth doin and has anybody here tried it? Specifically with SATA not IDE, the mb I have is the MSI K8N diamond plus with 6 SATAs. Thanks for any help or info.

 

[the Chase]

Haven't tried it but sustained transfer rates skyrocket! If you move a lot of big files around it should kick butt.

 

[GrammatonJP]

I tried similar with 8 146gb in scsi 0.. but some douche bag didnt like my results so Im not going to talk about it.. but it was fast.

 

[imported_Phil]

I've done 4x SAS 15krpm 74GB Fujitsus in RAID-0. A single drive was something like 93MB/sec sustained read rate. I forget the actual read rate of the array, but it was stupidly quick, not to mention unreliable because it was a pre-production controller from LSI.

 

[daction]

Hmmm interesting, thanks guys. Forgot to mention at first but specifically I wanna try Raid 0 x4 with the onboard SATA raid chip on my board. Anyone done this or doing it now?

 

[EatSpam]

I'd rather trust my data to a floppy than RAID 0.

 

[Rubycon]

Two words: bus hog.

Sounds like fun. I know someone that works with 15 drive arrays. Geeks and their toys.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Two words: bus hog.

On the nForce 4, doesn't the onboard nVidia RAID controller communicate directly with the chipset. If so, it shouldn't be hogging the PCI or PCIe bus at all, unlike the non-native onboard RAID controllers (such as ones running off a Silicon Image or Adaptec chip).

 

[IH82LUZ2FRDS]

He, I have an Abit KN8 Ultra NForce 4 mobo and have ran 4xRAID 0 with 4 Seagate 80GB Sata II 7200.9 drives. It was fast as heck, sandra did 205MB/s write to them and HDTach did over 350MB/s read. Games have never loaded faster for me, windows installed in 9 minutes. Booted up insane. I would recomend it highly!!!!

But yes, there are downsides, you do have a 4 times higher risk of HDD failure. But to be honest, and I can say this because I have a storage server to hold all my important data, I don't care if my raid hiccuped and I would have to reinstall windows. Personally I think the performance outweighs the negatives.

It all comes down to what you want, if you want just raw speed, get 4 of those seagates, they are $51 a piece on newegg right now and are fast as heck. But if don't like the possibilty of losing data then it's not for you. However the mobo I have supports, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 5 and Spanning. I run Raid 5 ATM, because I've been testing out the different raids, and however the write speeds aren't as great as them all in Raid 0, the read speeds are very similar. Plus the Abit KN8 Ultra supports hot swap sata. Which is a plus since you can swap hdd's out while it's running in a Raid 1 or 5 situation.

But if you do have questions let me know, I'd be happy to answer.

Rob