Disk performance and redundancy, ???

[gwarren007]

I have questions regarding disk peformance and redundancy. I see that Win7 has a guage of disk performance, and I had been thinking about disk performance in our computer (main) than we have. We have a single 320gb Wd drive in there :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136074

We use our computer for general web surfing and we run Photoshop CS2 for photo editing and for video copying/burning.

HD Tach results:
Quick bench (8mb Zones)
I ran HD tach version 3.0.4.0
random access15.5ms
average read 95MB/s
burst speed 240.1MB/s
Cpu usage 1%

Long bench (32mb Zones)
random access15.3ms
average read 95.4MB/s
burst speed 235.6MB/s
Cpu usage 2%


I have heard that raid 0 offers more peformance due to striping, and raid 1 offers redundancy due to mirroring. Can you run raid 0+1 so you have both?
Peformance and redundancy? Space isnt a concern as we have a full tower and only 1 bay is used for a HD. I had seen where someone had used 4 ssd's in a raid array to achieve 750MB/s transfer rate. What are my options at this point?

I'm also looking to build a server, and these questions apply to it as well.
I'm thinking of running Win7 Pro- 64bit, or WHS on it.
Software: CS4, office 2007, diagnostic tools
Parts obtained: (may or may not use any/all)
rocketfish case
550w truepower trio
9600gt
500gb aaks
1tb green
5120es (really like to get 50w quads, btw)
2gb edge 667

Asking questions that I have been thinking about, any helpful ideas are welcome. :D

[Easius]

RAID 0+1 would work with a minimum of 4 drives, however raid 5 would be a much nicer option.

Regarding your server: What exactly will it be used for? Are you running it as a workstation as well or just a server for rendering/file hosting/back ups/downloads ?

[gwarren007]

Running it as a workstaion for CS4 and for backups for movies, wifes photos, file sharing

[gwarren007]

raid 5 seems as though thats what I'm looking for, I am considering 4-500gb drives for the raid and this:
http://www.svc.com/ex-34b.html
To put n the three bottom 5.25 bays

[Syntax Error]

Well, RAID 5 also has a lot of CPU overhead in parity calculations, not to mention write speeds are generally reduced due to calculating parity and such.

Good RAID 5 requires the use of a hardware RAID card (not cheap); onboard RAID 5 (ICH10R) is bare-minimum in my eyes, and gets lackluster performance.

You can probably try doing Intel Matrix Raid, where you'd have two disks partitioned at the BIOS level (out of Windows), one partition striped like RAID 0 for performance, and the other partitioned for RAID 1 (redundancy).

Obviously, if one drive was to fail, the mirrored partition (which would be your boot partition) would still be accessible, but your RAID 0 partition would be kaput. Also, the RAID 0 benefit of the secondary partition would be lost if you were doing intensive I/O on the OS level, but generally speaking, it's not a bad setup and a "best of both worlds" sort of thing.

RAID 1 should be able to have enhanced read speeds as you have two drives with the same data and it'd read off of both drives for your data, but many software (i.e., "fakeRAID", aka onboard RAID) do not do this.

[Thor]

i have run raid 5 on 4 drives in the past, , it works.. however i recommend going with 6 disks in raid 5 the performance difference is great , remember when you go to a 1 or 5 you lose disks, and thus space (you can acctually raid 5 with 3 disks) where as you with 0, you gain speed but loose redundency, that siad i have been runing the same 2 80gb seagates in raid 0 for about 5 years now, and i have a seconed set of 80gb raid 0 going on 3 years, i could put all 4 disks into raid 0, but last time i tryed that it ate up 40% cpu (on a dual core 4200+ ) if i had my 6 port sata bord i would toss my other 2 80gb drives in and migrate to 6 disk raid 5, (last time i had that set up it only used 15% cpu, so not to bad really)

the reason i dont like 3 or 4 disk raid 5 is because you paying for 2tb of space but only getting about 1.2 after everything is said and done (you lose 1 disk outright bringing it to 1.5 and lose a bit more with the formatting) , where as with 6 disk if you go to say 320 gb disks, you end up with 1.6tb preformat (closer to 1.3 after) 2 more disks for extra speed, negligable cpu over head, for not much more cost (well, ok, useing seagates on newegg its an extra 100$... but still, the preformance difference is worth it) of course this is all well and siad if your board dose not support 6 sata disks

[lodingi]

Take a look at Intel's Matrix Raid (http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-012525.htm). It allows you to do Raid 0 & Raid 1 on only 2 physical drives. I plan on going this route over the weekend.

[gwarren007]

I'm lookig at this mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182146

[Syntax Error]

I'm lookig at this mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182146

Why? It's a server board in which the processor (LGA 771) are expensive and the onboard RAID is just ICH9R, which you can get in many consumer motherboards (though most nowadays has ICH10R, the newer revision).

[Easius]

It's still not full hardware raid. For best performance you would need a RAID card.

Newegg is doing 40$ off on the areca 1210 through the weekend with FS. (Promo code EMCLTPL46)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL063009&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL063009-_-HardDriveControllersRAIDCards-_-LC7A-_-16131003

Still quite expensive but will get you the best performance for a raid set up.

You don't need a server board.
I would just go for a quad core, a fast core 2 duo, or an i7.

[gwarren007]

I have the e5120 (lga 771) and ECC 2gb of ram (edge) as stated in first post

[DougLite]

Random access performance on RAID-5, especially with any sort of write activity at all, will be poor. RAID-10 is the best choice for fault tolerant enhanced throughput on a desktop. On my dad's Highpoint 2310, RAID-10 outperformed RAID-5 (both arrays were tested using the same drives) by roughly 20MB/sec in linear read with a four drive array. Writing to RAID-5 is an even bigger performance hit - you have to read the whole block that is being modified, then perform the XOR calculation, then write the whole block. Even on a RAID controller with an XOR accelerator, that is still going to be slow.

[gwarren007]

When/where do you get disk peformance and redundancy? That is the real question. I just want to know HOW.

[thesmokingman]

When/where do you get disk peformance and redundancy? That is the real question. I just want to know HOW.

When/where... is the point where you are able/willibg to throw lots of cash at your goal. If I were you, I'd just use 3 drives, 1 for OS, 1 for data, and 1 for backing up images. There are huge considerations and ramifications when employing raid arrays, obviously there is NO FREE lunch with raid. And to top it off you'll still need a backup for it. Doh!

[gwarren007]

I'm pointing out lga771 motherboard, considering (seriosly) a raid card, and moving from Xeon 5120 to dual hapertown's, I get the message that isn't a FREE LUNCH.

Ok, so I buy any mother board, buy a raidcard, configure it in some form, and hope I do it right to get the performance I want to have.

OK, got it!