4 raptors, what SATA Raid card?

[I(illa Bee]

Sorry for another "what should i buy" tread

OK, so i have a singal raptor 36gig drive...ill be getting another in a week.

I would like to Stripe them, and im not a big fan of onbaord RAID. Now i play on getting 2 more raptors so i can run 4 drive in RAID0 in the next few mounths...

Can you guys sugest both a lower end (sub $100) Raid card, and a higher end card...

I like the idea of onbaord memory..like this card http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-023&depa=0 but im boat sure if i want to spend the dough on it. Is is alot better? will i notice it..

I may run the onboard controller untill i get 4 drives then run a nicer card...

[EnderW]

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

[defakto]

I'm going avoid that debate.

[I(illa Bee]

what? im not asking for a debate, If i decide to not spend the dough (sub $100) what is a godo card....if i decide to spend it then what card?

[djnes]

I think the frowns and comments were about the overall waste SATA RAID0 is turning out to be. However, I do think when you use 4 drives, the performance does improve a little. My personally, I would not consider RAID at all unless it's RAID5. You'd have real speed and redundancy.

[unhappy_mage]

repeat after me: raid0 on 2 disks gains you nothing.

get a real raid5 controller (think 3ware or lsi or adaptec) and 4 disks. anything else is a waste of $.
http://www.mentallyretired.com/h/index.cfm/u_rogue_jedi (http://www.hardfolding.com)

[shieldforyoureyes]

RAID0 with 4 or even just 2 raptors will be insanely fast.
Is your PCI bus 66 Mhz / 64 bit? If not, that will be your
bottleneck.
And of course.... what are you doing? Insanely fast striped
disks don't do much for "typical" desktop use. I assume you're
doing stuff that is limited by disk io?

[Jonsey]

3ware or lsi or adaptec

I don't think sub $100 card and those companies go together. You can try a card from highpoint or promise for that price. I just bought a highpoint 4 port SATA contoller card that supports RAID for a file server. But I'm just using it to run a RAID 1 with 2 250 GB HDDs. Performance was not part of the consideration.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-115-015&depa=0

I know people around here hate toms but they did a mid range RAID 5 performance review awhile back:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040625/index.html

I don't think you'll find much of a noticable difference in speed, though. Let us know how it works out if you decide to give it a try!

[Lazn_Work]

RAID0 with 4 or even just 2 raptors will be insanely fast.
Is your PCI bus 66 Mhz / 64 bit? If not, that will be your
bottleneck.
And of course.... what are you doing? Insanely fast striped
disks don't do much for "typical" desktop use. I assume you're
doing stuff that is limited by disk io?

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101
"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200406/20040625TCQ_1.html
"Though evidence has been presented to the contrary, a combination of overzealous marketing as well as general lack of knowledge has resulted in the proliferation of RAID among power users running single-user workstations. While considerable argument may be made for the redundancy provided by RAID1, the increase in transfer rates and high-I/O random access performance delivered by RAID0 simply do not benefit most non-server uses."
and
"The enthusiasm of the power user community combined with the marketing apparatus of firms catering to such crowds has led to an extraordinarily erroneous belief that striping data across two or more drives yields significant performance benefits for the majority of non-server uses. This could not be farther from the truth! Non-server use, even in heavy multitasking situations, generates lower-depth, highly-localized access patterns where read-ahead and write-back strategies dominate. Theory has told those willing to listen that striping does not yield significant performance benefits. Some time ago, a controlled, empirical test backed what theory suggested. Doubts still lingered- irrationally, many believed that results would somehow be different if the array was based off of an SATA or SCSI interface. As shown above, the results are the same. Save your time, money and data- leave RAID for the servers!"


==>Lazn

[defakto]

Raid 0 is great for dealing with large files, like massive video edits, BUT only as a temp storage solution for them.

[shieldforyoureyes]

Let's see... I point out that RAID0 won't help for typical desktop use,
and ask what the disk-io heavy problem this is for, and I get
a response that RAID0 doesn't help typical desktop use.
Amazing.

[v3rt1g0]

*PLEASE*

Let's avoid the raid-0 performance arguments and answers the guy's question.

I think the true problem you're going to run into is the bandwidth of the PCI bus. If you're running RAID-0 with four drives, the throughput is going to outstrip the maximum capacity of the PCI bus (this is true with just two raptors in RAID-0 also). Not sure what kind of chipset you have, but you'd probably be way better off using the onboard SATA RAID *IF* it's directly supported by the north/southbridge (eg- hard drive data doesn't have to pass over the PCI bus -- I know my K8N Neo2 does this -- nForce3 250 Ultra). shieldforyoureyes mentioned this. Do you have a "server" board with higher bandwidth PCI slots?

[I(illa Bee]

hmmmm, well sorry i asked.... but i can recall not seeing any diffrence between my old 2 80gig RAID0 and my current 4x80gig RAID0.......makes sence...some reading show you guys are right...

This is cool, and i can just save my money and keep 1 raptor.. lol...

I still want to run my 80gig drive in raid so i can use them as one drive... as for relibility of RAID0, if it crashes it crashes, thats what dual layer DVD backs up are for....

[v3rt1g0]

For the record, I own this card, Promise SATA150 TX4:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-013&depa=0

It works great. Never had any problems.
BUT the biggest problem, as I mentioned before, is PCI bus bandwidth.
After I hooked the raptors up to my new board (sig), disk I/O was NOTICIBLY faster because of the built-in SATA controller in the nForce3 250 Ultra.

In the wake of the flood of posts no doubt citing the anandtech article, I strongly urge you to look at hard numbers instead of synthetic benchmark suites.
The following may incite some flames, but it's true -- all the people bashing RAID-0 are the one's who don't/can't have it, and they poo-poo it to feel better about the performance of their single disk.

[doormat]

I'm more worried about 1 disk failing in a 4 disk raid 0 array and you losing all your data. I'd recomend a card that has a 0+1 config, and have 4 raptors in 0+1, to get speed and redundancy.

[v3rt1g0]

Raptors are wasted in any mirrored config. I mean, you're paying a premium per gig already, and you're doubling the cost per gig by using mirroring.
The best thing to do is leave all the drives in RAID-0 and get a single big backup hard drive and use ghost to backup your array weekly.

[Impulse]

I agree with v3rt1g0; unless you use your computer for some kinda highly sensitive work, mirroring with Raptors is waste of resources. Just run weekly backups on an extra drive, an external one, or DVD media like you've said.

P.S. 'singal', 'relibility', and 'sence' made this thread worth reading... :o