Fastest hard drive combination - RAID 0, 5?

[Fraggable]

I do computer work on the side, and whenever a client asks me to build them a system, I usually sell them some of my 'old' parts (usually less than 6 months) and upgrade myself. This time I'm selling and replacing my E6600 with a E6750, replacing 2 X 1GB DDR2 667 with 4 X 1GB DDR2 800, replacing my basic ECS board with a Intel P35 board with 8 SATA2 ports and RAID 0,1,0+1,5 support, and replacing my dual 80GB SATA150 and 400GB SATA2 drives with...

And that's the question. I'm running Vista Home Premium and it's brutally slow with a single 80GB SATA drive. I record SDTV to my 400GB drive, and if it's recording at the same time I'm trying to multitask, it's laggy and pitifully slow. I used to run the 2 80GB drives in RAID 0 and it was much better, but last time I reinstalled Vista my floppy drive quit and I wasn't able to get RAID working without it.

So now I'm wanting something a bit faster than RAID 0, and have a budget of less than $300 for my new drives. I need at least 300GB for recorded TV, more would be nice. I'm thinking about getting 3 250GB drives and a new 320GB for a RAID 5 + storage drive. Or I could go with some combination of 5 160GB drives, maybe a RAID 5 with 3 of them and dynamic disk on the other 2...

So many choices. My goal here is speed on my boot disk, and a separate disk to store documents, pics, that sort of thing.

 

[cmbehan]

Will the RAID controller support multiple arrays?

If so, go with 2 150GB Raptors in a RAID 0 for your OS and Apps and 3 or 4 250GB drives in a RAID 5 for your storage. (250Gb seems to be the best cost/GB right now...with drives costing as little as $50 for full retail)

 

[Fraggable]

I'm 99% sure it does, but I have a $300 budget...

2 150GB Raptors are right at $300 alone. Not that I wouldn't love that, but I gotta spend money elsewhere and that doesn't give me the capacity I need.

I feel nervous using any tpe of array for storage, I hate having my documents subject to failure of a hardware component like a RAID controller since it's happened to me before.

 

[imported_Baloo]

If all you want is speed, use raid 0, if you want redundancy, use raid 0+1. I'd stay away from Raid 5, it slow. Raid 5 was used for years in server environments, but that;s beginning to change. Raid 0+1 is taking its place with much better performance, and less cpu intensive as well.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
...but I have a $300 budget

Ah, the downfall of every noble cause... "the budget".

I can't tell you how many a young mans dreams have been broken by the reality of the actual cost of their dream parts.

 

[Fraggable]

Originally posted by: Baloo
If all you want is speed, use raid 0, if you want redundancy, use raid 0+1. I'd stay away from Raid 5, it slow. Raid 5 was used for years in server environments, but that;s beginning to change. Raid 0+1 is taking its place with much better performance, and less cpu intensive as well.

Darn, so RAID 5 is slow? I thought it would be kind off fast like RAID 0, since it's striping data across 3 drives. I gues sthe overhead of parity might slow things down.

My goal here really isn't redundacy and backups, the only data I have that I'll want backed up is my documents, which I want on a separate drive, not in any type of array that depends on a certain controller. I just want speed and capacity.

 

[rchiu]

stick with raid 0 if you want pure speed. Raid 5 has decent read performance but the write performance sucks.

Here is a nice review on different raid using onboard controllers.

From my experience, raid is more trouble than its worth. With your 300 budget, you can get a 750gig hdd or wait for a deal on a 1000gig hdd. According to Storagereview.com leaderboard, the Hitachi Deskstar 7k1000 1000gig hdd is as fast and sometimes faster than raptor. Also seem like you are looking to multi-task with your HDD, so you might want to make sure you enable the command queuing feature.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Spend $350 and get a 150gb WD Raptor for your o/s and 750gb WD SE16 and you'll be good to go.

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
Darn, so RAID 5 is slow? I thought it would be kind off fast like RAID 0, since it's striping data across 3 drives. I gues sthe overhead of parity might slow things down.

RAID 5 is slower than RAID 0 due to the parity calculations (and added writes as a result of those). How much slower depends on your RAID processor.

From your statement, you seem to be under the impression that RAID 0 is limited to 2 drives. It's not. You can stripe across as many drives as you have ports for with RAID 0. It's pretty well frowned upon to go more than a few drives because your risk of drive failure/data loss increases with each drive added. But if you're ok with the risk and strictly want performance, RAID 0 is the way to go.

There are 2 real options to increasing storage speed. Use faster disks. Or use more disks.

 

[Fraggable]

Originally posted by: MerlinRML

Originally posted by: Fraggable
Darn, so RAID 5 is slow? I thought it would be kind off fast like RAID 0, since it's striping data across 3 drives. I gues sthe overhead of parity might slow things down.

RAID 5 is slower than RAID 0 due to the parity calculations (and added writes as a result of those). How much slower depends on your RAID processor.

From your statement, you seem to be under the impression that RAID 0 is limited to 2 drives. It's not. You can stripe across as many drives as you have ports for with RAID 0. It's pretty well frowned upon to go more than a few drives because your risk of drive failure/data loss increases with each drive added. But if you're ok with the risk and strictly want performance, RAID 0 is the way to go.

There are 2 real options to increasing storage speed. Use faster disks. Or use more disks.

I don't really care about drive failure, if one fails Ill just get it replaced under warranty and reinstall Vista, no big deal. I plan to image the system once I get it all installed anyway so it's easier to reinstall.

I'm thinking I may go with 4 250GB drives, RAID 0 three of four of them, I don't know yet. I have another PC I can back my stuff up to, so I don't really need a separate documents drive I guess.

 

[sun818]

Yeah, RAID 0 is best for performance, but you got balls making it your OS volume. Even if you keep documents on a separate drive, you still have application data that will sit on the OS drive. I suggest looking into using portable apps so your recovery process is easier when one of your striped drives does fail. I know you plan on imaging your system which makes the point moot if you keep your image current.

 

[rgallant]

My 2 cents , I have 4 80 gig sata II in Intel Matrix Two raids on ONE set of drives so
I have 4 x 30 gigs in raid 0 system and the rest in raid 10 weekly back up and protected data
raid 10 is very fast , raid 0 is also really fast on 4 drives
but before you guys jump on the fact of 4 drives =400% more failures, think of it this way
I have 4 platters and four heads ,most of the larger or common drives you can buy now have just a many ,more than one or two platters and more than one head, and are push it the same space as one of my drives,
they have just as many parts ,but can not hit 160 Mbs in HD tach
4x50 =$200.00

 

[Fraggable]

Well I went with 3 WD 250GB SATA 2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. I was going to run HD Tach but it apparently doesn't work on Vista.

Subjectively judging the speed, I'm going to say it's 5X faster than a single 80GB SATA 150 drive was.

 

[jkresh]

For most uses (even what you are listing) raid 0 realy shouldn't help much if at all (would be different if you are working with raw video and especially with raw hd video). A raptor for your os + a 500gig for video should be fine. Raid 5 can be fast (not as fast as raid 0 with the same number of drives, but still very fast) the problem is in order to get good speed with raid 5 you need a real raid card (with a fair amount of ram and processing power on it) which is way out of your budget.

 

[Fraggable]

Originally posted by: jkresh
For most uses (even what you are listing) raid 0 realy shouldn't help much if at all (would be different if you are working with raw video and especially with raw hd video). A raptor for your os + a 500gig for video should be fine. Raid 5 can be fast (not as fast as raid 0 with the same number of drives, but still very fast) the problem is in order to get good speed with raid 5 you need a real raid card (with a fair amount of ram and processing power on it) which is way out of your budget.

soo... you're saying RAID 0 with 3 drives really isn't doing anything for me? It cut down on boot time by about 5 minutes, I do work with video, particularly recorded TV. But even besides that, everything is just screaming along.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
It cut down on boot time by about 5 minutes, I do work with video, particularly recorded TV.

damn, 5min :Q, i run full scsi and don't even see boot times like that.....

and what work do you do w/ video?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Is this a new format or fresh install that you are comparing boot times on?

 

[Fraggable]

I just timed a cold boot. 2 mins, 47 secs. from the push of the power button till both my Sidebar gadgets load up and hard drive activity stops. I have Steam, AVG, PowerStrip, and my Logitech G15 software loading at startup.

My last install that I'm comparing this to was an upgrade from Win XP MCE>Vista HP versus my new install of Vista HP 64-bit.

As far as benchmarking, I haevn't found a HDD speed test for Vista yet, but my Windows Experience Index shows a HDD transfer rate score of 5.9.

Ok, apparently Sandra works. Here's my results:

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/fraggable/HDD_bench.jpg

My array consistentle beats a Hitachi Deskstar 160GB X2 RAID 0 array, whoops a 36GB Raptor by a factor of 2.5.

 

[Fraggable]

Originally posted by: bob4432

and what work do you do w/ video?

I do a lot of editing with recorded TV, cutting commercials, picking out the good stuff, you know.

 

[jkresh]

Fraggable, If you are working with a lot of uncompressed video then raid definitely helps (look at any good video workstaion and it will be running raid 5 sas drives). As for the 5 minutes off your boot time something was wrong, it should never take more then 5 minutes to get to the desktop in a current system. I would guess that your 80 gig sata 1 drive was the problem and that evne 1 of the new drives you are using in your array would have made a tremendous difference.

Also yes, benchmarks show raid 5 as improving, but gaming benchmarks or most real world benches dont, its just strait drive benchmark that show most of it. Part of this and the reason why subjectively a raptor (or a solid state drive) may be faster then a raid array is that for most users seek times are more important then bandwidth (as for most users they are looking for small files most of the time not dealing with reading/writing hundreds of megabytes/gigabytes).

Now if you are copying a 80gig video file then raid will show a major improvement over a raptor, on a 1-2gig file it will be there but not necessarily all that noticeable.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
So many choices. My goal here is speed on my boot disk, and a separate disk to store documents, pics, that sort of thing.

Agreed with JKresh.

Most people don't need RAID. It sounds like you have a problem with your current 80GB drive. Check your System eventlog for errors.

I'd get a simple (new, reliable) 80GB. I'd put the OS on that, and I'd record to a 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB single disk volume.

That said, though, MCE takes advantage of an MPEG2 hardware recorder. You should be able to record safely and completely to a snail of a drive (as long as it's fully working), *AND* run your OS on it, *AND* multitask, *AND* play games, etc., and it should be fully fine.

I had an old dinosaur of an AMD XP3000+ with 1GB and MCE2005 running 3 SDTV tuners (with the hack) and did just what I wrote above - 500GB for Recorded TV, 40GB to boot the OS. I pretty much stuck it under the TV and forgot about it, as any good media center should be forgotten.