What Raid are good?

[khicon]

I'm planning to buy another xact sataII drive and thinking about doing a raid. What raid are good as far as speed ans security wise? I heard raid 1 is the way to go.

Any input or comment is most welcome

Thank you.

 

[CrimsonKnight]

RAID0 combines the drive sizes and theoretically increases speed

(ex 2x 250GB = 1x 500GB)

with RAID1, you will still have 2 drives, but it will only show up as one, however any data written to it will be written to both drives

(ex 2x 250GB = 1x250GB but with a backup 250GB)

RAID1 is the way to go security wise, since an auto backup is nice, but you halve the space.
RAID0 a lot of ppl say don't even bother with, since you have a double chance of your uber big drive failing....but i run a 2x250 RAID0 setup myself and have had no probs....so w/e

 

[D1gger]

Raid 0 (data striped across two drives) is potentially the fastest, but is the most vulnerable. If one drive fails, you lose the entire array. Raid 1 (data mirrored on second drive) offers redundancy, but does not offer any improvement in performance.

To get the best of both worlds, you might want to look into Raid 1+0, which means data is striped across two drives and then mirrored on two more. It gives you maximum performance gains as well as full redundancy. It does require a minumum of four drives.

 

[khicon]

wow... 4 drives of the xact is harsh... I don't have the $$ for it and beside I don't want my case to be like an oven with all the heat coming out fo the hd. But anyhow, right now I have my windows installing in a raptor and 3 others drive as a back up data and home video. So do I get any benefit out if I buy another sataII and let say do raid-0 and install windows into the raid-0. Would the raid-0 of the 2 drives beat the raptor? or its not worth it?

Thank you for the fast reply guys, aprreciated.

EDIT:

Also, I play CS, CS:S, HL2, Guild War and Sometimes BF2. So gaming wise and speed which raid is the way to go and about the raptor. I'm all new to raid. Please xcuse my newbieness question. Thanks

 

[nweaver]

Please remember, Raid 0 is not a BACKUP, do not treat it as such. Running a second drive and a backup script often is better then raid 1 for BACKUP PURPOSES.

 

[khicon]

Well, I'm thinking like this. Raptor as for my main OS. Maybe 2 sataII drive in raid-0 for Gamings and Movies wise. My 120Gig Seagate for important data and document and such. How is that setup? Any idea of a better setup for this? thanks.

 

[Rilex]

RAID IS NOT BACKUP. RAID is for Redundancy.

Period. End of story.

If your "backup" is on a platter, it is not a backup.

 

[khicon]

by reduncancy what do u mean? Performance and speed wise? How good are the WD CaviarSE drive? does it corrup easy and such? Well look into post #6, how does that setup look? Good, bad or neither? Please, I need more inputs on this.. thanx

 

[D1gger]

Redundancy is not backup. A backup means you have a failsafe method of retrieving your data if you have a hardware / software or operator failure. Redundancy only protects against a failure of a single hard drive. For example, if you delete or modify a file and suddenly realize your error, Raid 1 won't help you because the mirror image deleted or modified the file on both drives as you made the change. You must still have a backup strategy in place to provide a method of recovery of the files in the case of operator error, or system failure that affects integrity of the system. In a well managed system, these backups will actually be kept in an offsite location to protect against physical disaster such as hurricane or fire that destroys your building.

I have a RAID 0 system with two raptors for the operating system and programs, and I do find it to be more responsive and seems to be generally faster. I keep all of my data on a third drive and back it up to DVD religiously (I even keep a copy of the backup off-site). This is the configuration that I would recommend.

 

[khicon]

D1gger, thanks for explaining that to me. Well I does have a backup drive and also a server that I transfer my important document to. That server is being located at my seconday home located 5 miles away from where this box is currently located at. So a backup drive and a server is a pretty good back up. Now on to with Raid. Refer to post #6 that I've post, what are people comment on those? Thanks

 

[imported_BikeDude]

Originally posted by: D1gger
Raid 1 (data mirrored on second drive) offers redundancy, but does not offer any improvement in performance.

Given a decent controller and plenty of read requests -- why can't the read requests be divided between the two (or more...) drives?

I think you'll find that there's room for performance improvement when taking on a RAID-1 array. Whether your controller is smart enough to get the job done or not is a different matter.

 

[Nothinman]

So gaming wise and speed which raid is the way to go and about the raptor. I'm all new to raid. Please xcuse my newbieness question. Thanks

Do you really find your games slowing down in the middle because of hard disk access? If so, you might benefit from RAID, otherwise you'll be taking a huge risk for no real gains.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

my 2 cents...take it for what it's wort. i have tried a number of combinations of raid and found the most reliable and best performing config is:

2-3 drives raid 0 sata for boot and games. be aware that ALL of the data will be lost if there is a drive issue. ii use ghost to image that drive to another drive for redundancy. i keep all important data in one folder and replicate that. i don't have anything setup for disaster recovery...but i accept that risk.

the performance i get from 1 sata is about 120MB/s burst. in raid 0 i'm seeing 200MB.
/s i expect too see about 300 with 3 drives.

again, i'm after speed not redundancy.

remember that even with mirroring raid 0 you can still lose ALL of you data if you get a filesystem error or a virus. backups are the only way to ensure data protection.

again, just my opinion

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

my 2 cents...take it for what it's wort. i have tried a number of combinations of raid and found the most reliable and best performing config is:

2-3 drives raid 0 sata for boot and games. be aware that ALL of the data will be lost if there is a drive issue. ii use ghost to image that drive to another drive for redundancy. i keep all important data in one folder and replicate that. i don't have anything setup for disaster recovery...but i accept that risk.

the performance i get from 1 sata is about 120MB/s burst. in raid 0 i'm seeing 200MB.
/s i expect too see about 300 with 3 drives.

again, i'm after speed not redundancy.

remember that even with mirroring raid 0 you can still lose ALL of you data if you get a filesystem error or a virus. backups are the only way to ensure data protection.

again, just my opinion

 

[KoolDrew]

For gaming don't even bother with RAID-0. It could actually decrease performance since it is not good for seek times. The reason for this is that each disk has to seek to their portion of the data. This will not be good for small files and the OS is filled with small files. RAID-0 is good for large sequential read and writes. It also significantly reduces reliability.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Originally posted by: KoolDrew
For gaming don't even bother with RAID-0. It could actually decrease performance since it is not good for seek times. The reason for this is that each disk has to seek to their portion of the data. This will not be good for small files and the OS is filled with small files. RAID-0 is good for large sequential read and writes. It also significantly reduces reliability.

I have to disagree with this on several points. My current rig gets the following:

SATA I (250GB) -- 128.6MB/Sec burst, 50.4MB/s Avg, 11.9ms response, 5% CPU
NForce4 Stripe (300GB) -- 200.2MB/s burst, 71.8MB avg, 8% CPU, 13ms response.

The biggest issues I see are CPU util and the "sawtooth" nature of the read performance curve. I would guess that these are both heavily related to the controller. In this case I'm using the onboard nForce4 chip to do the striping, which eats up CPU cycles.

What I'm looking for in game performance is usually load times, where burst and average transfer is more important than response time. I can't see where response time would be of benefit outside of database type random access applications. I haven't seen this as a requirement for most of the games I play. I see your point for small files in OS loads...but I'm willing to take an 8.5% performance hit on seeks to gain a 60% benefit in transfer speed.

I could be wrong here, as I'm not a game programmer...but what I want is fast throughput, which RAID0 gives me.

Again...I have to reiterate that mirroring is only partial protection for your data. It only helps for hardware issues. If you want to protect your data you have to backup frequently...and if you do that, then the only benefit to Mirroring is data availability not protection. I personally don't mind taking the outage for hardware loss if I can get better performance.

my 2 cents.

 

[Mesix]

Oakland!

 

[KoolDrew]

Seek time dominates transfer rate when it comes to HD performance.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Curious, I'm thinking of setting-up a RAID5. How would you compare it to the already discussed options?

 

[Nothinman]

Curious, I'm thinking of setting-up a RAID5. How would you compare it to the already discussed options?

For home use it's generally a waste because you need atleast 3 disks and you only get N-1 space available. If you use software RAID the CPU will have to compute all of the parity which might affect performance, especially in games.

 

[ElTorrente]

My RAID setup is pretty effin fast. I never have to wait very long for anything. If you think RAID isn't worth it, or is slow, you just haven't used my particular setup yet. I will gladly give up a few milliseconds in seek time (which I don't notice anyway) for a crazy increase in read/write/transfer rates.

My CPU utilization on the last HDTach I ran was only 1%. In BF2, I am ALWAYS the first person into a newly loaded map- EVERY time, without exception. The last time I ran PCMark05, I was the 5th fastest X2 ever tested. - RAID is an integral part of my system, and helps make my computer faster overall.

Someone can point to a few milliseconds advantage of a Raptor or something- but if I replaced my setup with a Raptor or two- I wouldn't like it - they would slow me down. RAID0 is great if you spend the money on a good controller. If you use onboard and a couple disks- you won't see much advantage.. especially since CPU utlilization on a crap card will degrade other aspects of your computing experience. For instance, loading levels in games (a point of contention between RAID opponents and proponents), uses not just your disks to "load" the level, but uses your CPU and RAM to compile the level and actually get it "ready" for you to enter. So when you are sitting there waiting for that big level in HL2 or BF2 to load up, you are waiting for your entire computer to deal with it- not just the harddrive(s). Some games/levels require more CPU processing than others to load up, others are physically larger on the disk and require more time to pull up off the disk. Your entire system needs to be fast, and RAID can be an integral part of that equation.. IF you are willing to spend some money on it.

 

[Nothinman]

My CPU utilization on the last HDTach I ran was only 1%

That's because there's no real processing to do in RAID0, the data is evenly distributed across the disks.

RAID is an integral part of my system, and helps make my computer faster overall.

I would also assume your data is an integral part of your system and running RAID0 effectively increaces your chances of dataloss by a factor of how many drives you have in the array. Most people don't keep regular backups so the risk isn't worth the performance increase.

 

[ElTorrente]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

My CPU utilization on the last HDTach I ran was only 1%

That's because there's no real processing to do in RAID0, the data is evenly distributed across the disks.

RAID is an integral part of my system, and helps make my computer faster overall.

I would also assume your data is an integral part of your system and running RAID0 effectively increaces your chances of dataloss by a factor of how many drives you have in the array. Most people don't keep regular backups so the risk isn't worth the performance increase.

No, you are incorrect. A typical 4-disk RAID0 in HDTach can use up to 15%, or even more sometimes, of the CPU for a typical onboard, or other software RAID solution. In a RAID5, the CPU utilization would be SLIGHTLY higher, but still VERY low.

RAID0 is used for speed. Period. Of course I know the risks, and I don't really care.

I don't keep "important" data on my RAID array. In truth, I can't remember ever losing a harddrive in the last 15years or so. Even then, I have other non-RAID disks I save important files to, and burn DVDs for longer term storage. NOTHING is totally secure though.

RAID is only for redundancy and to keep a system up and running during a HD failure. If you rely on RAID to keep your data safe, you are just asking for trouble.

EDIT: I just ran HDTach on one of my Samsung drives that is just a single drive connected to my mobo, and it had 2% CPU utilization. So, that is twice as high as my 4 disk RAID card had - because of the Areca's 500mhz onboard processer and 128megs of RAM.

 

[Nothinman]

A typical 4-disk RAID0 in HDTach can use up to 15%, or even more sometimes, of the CPU for a typical onboard, or other software RAID solution. In a RAID5, the CPU utilization would be SLIGHTLY higher, but still VERY low.

Then I would say that the drivers handling that RAID are pretty bad, because there's virtually no computations necessary for reads or writes.

In truth, I can't remember ever losing a harddrive in the last 15years or so

Then you've been very lucky, hard disks are extremely shoddy these days. At work I've had to replace dozens of IDE drives and at home I've had to replace both IDE and SCSI disks, the things have moving parts so eventually something fails.

 

[ElTorrente]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

A typical 4-disk RAID0 in HDTach can use up to 15%, or even more sometimes, of the CPU for a typical onboard, or other software RAID solution. In a RAID5, the CPU utilization would be SLIGHTLY higher, but still VERY low.

Then I would say that the drivers handling that RAID are pretty bad, because there's virtually no computations necessary for reads or writes.

Dude - sorry but you are simply way off base. Show me some HDTach graphs of a 4 disk RAID0 from onboard controller that even remotely supports what you are trying to say. 15% or more is not uncommon for this test! 1% is very UNCOMMON unless you have onboard processing on your RAID card- and even then, that is very low.

If you want some proof, just go to the HDTach forums and look around there, and don't just make stuff up that you don't know anything about.