IDE RAID VS. IDE drives.

[Bad Dude]

Hello everyone,
I have been using RAID with my drives for over 3 years now. However, I have never try to use the drives without RAID. I just wonder if any one knows how much faster is IDE RAID over regular setup with just IDE? RAID 0 is what I am interested in.

I have finally got the two 120GB drives, with 8MB buffer. Now I just need to know which would be best for the setup. I will be play games, some video editing, and mostly use a normal PC.

PC Specs:
-2.53Ghz P4@3.06Ghz
-2X512MB RAM PC3000 Kingston HyperX
-ATI Radeon 9700 PRO
-Santa Cruz sound card

 

[DannyBoy]

If your prioritys are not backing up regularly, then you will find a RAID 0 array is much faster than a normal IDE drive.

If you want decent backup then go for RAID 1

If you want to lose a little speed but gain less chance of Failiure, then go with an 8mb chace 7200 drive, they are quick enough for games etc

 

[CAMS]

Originally posted by: Bad_Dude
Hello everyone,
I have been using RAID with my drives for over 3 years now. However, I have never try to use the drives without RAID. I just wonder if any one knows how much faster is IDE RAID over regular setup with just IDE?
I am interested in gaming and very little of video and music editing.
I have created a poll for regarding the subject.
Please vote base on your experience and opinions. Please give reasonings.
Thanks.

RAID What? 0? 1?
For general PC use RAID 0 offers little except an increased failure rate.

 

[mechBgon]

Check StorageReview's archive at http://www.storagereview.com/cgi-bin/news_archive.pl/10 and go down to "Is RAID0 Really Worth It?" They seem to think it's not worth it at the system level, despite high sustained transfer rates. Sort of like a dragster... yeah, it's fast in a straight line, but on a road course...?

 

[addragyn]

I am interested in gaming and very little of video and music editing.

Maybe your games load faster. That is it. You could've spent the $$ on a faster drive(10k or 15k) and seen faster load times for games plus improved seek performance in all applications.


If your prioritys are not backing up regularly, then you will find a RAID 0 array is much faster than a normal IDE drive.

No! Your STR(sustained transfer rate) will be higher. Your seeks will be the same / maybe marginally slower. For desktop performance it's the seeks that matter. In addition most IDE RAID is software RAID which means it's using your CPU.


HD manfs. should be paying a royalty to all the mobo companies which include a "RAID controller" on their boards.

 

[Bad Dude]

It seems like the polls is saying to go with RAID but other reasonings to say either one is not much a difference. Is this right? Should I just go with regular IDE?
Thanks.

 

[Sahakiel]

If you want speed on your desktop, and you can afford raid, you might as well use SCSI. For the price of a 80 GB 8MB IDE drive, you could pick up a 10k SCSI drive and a controller with enough left over for a cable. (Note I'm quoting "used", which doesn't bother me, especially since SCSI drives are much more reliable than IDE)
The only thing you'll really be sacrificing is capacity, but if you're only running the OS and programs of the drive, anyway, then 18 or even just 9GB should be enough.

 

[ElFenix]

drives don't make a lick of difference in the vast majority of games, except for between-level load times. personally i wouldn't risk the lower data integrity of raid 0.

 

[Bad Dude]

So if I do decide not to go with RAID, I can use the controller on board as the ATA controller for my drives, the question is, will this controller use some of my CPU cycle? Or will my CPU be used only when running RAID? Well I have been enjoying the fast windows boot and fast game load times. Other than that, I just use the RAID for this sole purpose. I have a second drive for my important stuffs.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Bad_Dude
So if I do decide not to go with RAID, I can use the controller on board as the ATA controller for my drives, the question is, will this controller use some of my CPU cycle? Or will my CPU be used only when running RAID? Well I have been enjoying the fast windows boot and fast game load times. Other than that, I just use the RAID for this sole purpose. I have a second drive for my important stuffs.

if its in DMA mode it shouldn't be using much CPU time. less than in RAID mode, i would think.

i get a fast boot and loads out of my JB drive. noticeably faster than my D740x was.

 

[giocopiano]

I don't know why you guys beat up on RAID 0. You get much faster sequential transfer rate whilst still using all the available capacity of your drives. If you have been guilty of reading processor, memory or motherboard reviews basing decisions on the 5% performance differences they come down to, why would you dismiss IDE speed increase of 100% for only the cost of a controller. The price of an extra drive is not wasted because you get to use all of it. If you don't want that extra space, don't go with RAID 0. Simple.

So the chance of hardware failure doubles... but before the time of mechanical failure from old age, the kind of person who wants RAID 0 will probably have new faster drives. IDE is not really meant for 24/7 servers anyway, it neither has the fault tolerance or access time. But there is no rule to say that people can't make backups from RAID 0 drives.

 

[Bad Dude]

Hmm. This is costing my company a fortune to use wireless on an airplane. Would the 8MB buffer makes that much of a difference? I thought the bottle neck was the cable?
Thanks.

 

[CAMS]

Originally posted by: Bad_Dude
Hmm. I thought the bottle neck was the cable?
Thanks.

The 80 wire cable currently supports ata133 or 133mb/s transferr rate. Most hard drives cant sustain 45mb/s.
Unless you edit very large files then RAID 0 is a waste/risk. But if you want to save a few seconds.

 

[dj4005]

I don't know why you guys beat up on RAID 0. You get much faster sequential transfer rate whilst still using all the available capacity of your drives. If you have been guilty of reading processor, memory or motherboard reviews basing decisions on the 5% performance differences they come down to, why would you dismiss IDE speed increase of 100% for only the cost of a controller. The price of an extra drive is not wasted because you get to use all of it. If you don't want that extra space, don't go with RAID 0. Simple.

I think that the implication that data lost on RAID drives are somehow more lost than data lost on non-RAID drives.

If the information on a computer is important, BACK IT UP. Finding a convenient scapegoat doesn't bring it back.

 

[Janitah]

Raid 0 is actually slower reading your hard drive due to the overhead of raid. But writing to your hd is just a tad bit faster than standard ide without raid.

 

[Bad Dude]

I just modified the polls a little so please vote.

 

[Jeff7181]

I agree that seek times are more important than sustained transfer rate 90% of the time.

It all comes back to the question, what are you doing with the computer?

If you're doing some hardcore video editing, by all means, go with RAID... if you're looking for the best general useage performance, go with a single drive, the fastest one you can afford. SCSI drives are a little too expensive for general useage... but hopefully once the newness aspect of WD's Raptor drive wears off, it will be reasonably priced and not a bad solution for a speedy desktop.

If money is no object, go with IDE RAID 0 if you're looking for semi-affordable speed... and be sure to get a hardware RAID controller, not software.

If price matters, just get a quality 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drive.

I see no reason to use expensive SCSI drives in a desktop that isn't being used for professional work.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

One advantage to RAID 0 that nobody has mentioned is getting one very big logical drive. I have 2 x 120GB drives RAIDed together into one 240GB drive. Even at that, I only have 26GB free at the moment.

I use so much space by: copying whole CDs to WAVs using EAC (and only when I need something for the portable player will I use Lame to go to smaller MP3s; I just got tired over obsessing about lossy compressions); I also use an ATI video card to capture TV; I also use DVD decryprter to rip DVDs.

All of this is backed up on occasion (or I don't worry about it, since I have the original CDs or DVDs) and I don't put any OS stuff on the RAID array.

I've had 2 PCs (one XP one Linux) with 240GB raid 0 arrays for a couple of years and have not had a problem. Now with the 200GBs it would be pretty cool to have a 400GB array!

 

[addragyn]

One advantage to RAID 0 that nobody has mentioned is getting one very big logical drive.

JBOD does that but will allow you to use different sized disks without the increased risk to data with RAID 0.

 

[Bad Dude]

Originally posted by: addragyn
One advantage to RAID 0 that nobody has mentioned is getting one very big logical drive.

JBOD does that but will allow you to use different sized disks without the increased risk to data with RAID 0.

What does JBOD means?

I can't decide yet. I am thinking about a single big drive. But I have been enjoying RAID fast load on games.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Bad_Dude
It seems like the polls is saying to go with RAID but other reasonings to say either one is not much a difference. Is this right? Should I just go with regular IDE?
Thanks.

The polls just say which is faster, not which one you need.

I'd say to get the 7200rpm drive with 8MB cache. I do a lot of video editing on my secondary PC, and the RAID 0 setup there (7200rpm drives, 2MB cache each) really helped; of course, I had gone from a single 5400rpm drive if I remember correctly...but it was a very nice improvement. But if you do gaming and light video editing, you'd probably be better off with the single drive - the money you save could be put toward a faster processor, which is also useful for games and video encoding.
Though...I did just check your system rigs link; I guess a faster processor isn't really necessary. The description just says "IDE RAID" - I'm guessing you're using RAID 0 then. I'm not sure that you'd notice if you go to a single 7200rpm drive with 8MB cache; there might be a bit of a difference, but I really can't say for sure - you've got a fast system, so the impact of the drive switch may be small.

Originally posted by: Bad_Dude
Hmm. This is costing my company a fortune to use wireless on an airplane. Would the 8MB buffer makes that much of a difference? I thought the bottle neck was the cable?
Thanks.

I think that the cable is not the limiting factor - it's just that the drive relies on physical movement to read data. It needs to position the head correctly, which takes time, then wait for the right spot on the disc below to spin around, until it's under the head - then it can read/write data. As long as drives are mechanical, this is likely going to continue to be a problem. Transactions in RAM are measured in nanoseconds and gigabytes per second; hard drives are crawling along in milliseconds and megabytes per second.

 

[Bad Dude]

Thanks for the great answers guys.

 

[isaacmacdonald]

Faster for which user... for me 2 high capacity IDE drives on 2 different channels seems to be faster. The main reason is that I'm writing to one particular folder and a low rate but constantly (24/7). I've noticed signifigant hiccups when I use the same drive for my system + programs while my app writes in the background.

 

[stephenvv]

:light:

Tuning a RAID array is neglected in the storage review article. Stripe size, cluster size, controller cache all play a big role. My previous machine was a dell workstation 420 with 10,000 RPM drives connected to a RAID card with 64 MB cache. I ran the machine both with RAID 0, JBOSD & Normal. RAID zero is faster and worth the money, but make sure you setup is tuned for the kind of work your system does. And controller, drivers vary quite a bit in how well they perform.

RAID 0 also works better on drives with higher RPM's. I planning on a new system with Western Digital Raptors in a RAID 0. They are much more reliable drives (5 year warranty!!!) and seem ideally suited to desktop RAID 0, especially of Canterwood SATA bus.

here's a good local article on the subject:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491&p=1

 

[Bad Dude]

Just updated the polls. Perhaps the members can help better decide.
Thanks.