Is RAID any good.

[demetrics]

I am trying to build a really good gaming pc and video editing pc. Which processor is better AMD or P 4? How do I set up RAID 0 and 1?

 

[Trekster2]

Setting up RAID depends on the motherboard/RAID controller, so when you decide on a motherboard then ask the question again.

As for the processor, I'd go for a P4 if you plan on doing video editing.

 

[xdviper]

Raid 1 Is For Data Miroing. Lets Say One Of Your Harddrives Die, But U Forgot To Save Or Backup Some Of Ur Stuff, This Is Wear Raid 1 Comes Handy, It Writes Same File On To 2 Harddrives So You Always, No Matter What, You Have A Backup Of Your Stuff.
Raid O Is Data Spiting
Its Spitts The Harddrives.it Divied A File Into 2 Parts And Saves Each Part Into Each Hdd. When U Load The File, The File Loads Faster

 

[s10010001]

well id got with a Althlon 64 for sure...3200+ or higher...

As far as RAID gose... I love it, im runnign 4 maxtor 80gig 8mb cache drives on a Promise TX2000...a good raid card is a must, one can be had for under 100 now adays, but dont get some cheap 30 dollar card.. im a big fan of promise iv used 3 of there cards loved them all and preformence was top notch. My friend went with some chepo RAID card for his 2 80gig maxtors, his preformence was barely faster than a singal drive ...DONT DICK AROUND WITH ONBOARD SHIT!

To set it up you need to know what kidna fo raid you want (im gussing RAID0) then you need drives for that config... for RAID 0 you will need at least 2 matching HDDs (Same Size, RPM, Cache, DMA level) and a good Raid Card. I would sugest 4 drivers, in RAID 0 on a TX2000 or if you have the money the SX4000 with 256mb of SDram for buffer.

If you want to go with a kick ass setup...4 raptors on a promise s150...

onbaord controller memory helps alot this is a good ATA Raid card form promise...
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-012&depa=0

Here is a good SATA card
This is going to be my next RAID setup (hoppfully by next mounth)
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-023&depa=0
Pair that SATA card wup with some 36 gig raptors are your set for some good raid action... (66Mhz PCI would make it perfect)

If those are too buch bling bling...
this is the card im useing now

and the SATA counterpart... for 2 SATA drives theres a nice one with only 2..its pretty cheap..

you have alot of options... how about you tell us how much HDD space you want total, and how much money you want to spend.....

 

[Stiletto One]

These guys are kinda scary. Like, rabid !!!!!! type scary.

Anyway, P4 if you're doing major video editing. (With hyperthreading, of course.)

On RAID0: It stripes data across all drives in an array, so theoretically your performance gets multiplied by however many drives there are, but it never actually happens that way. Except maybe with a professional level RAID card, in which case any sane person uses RAID5.

On RAID1: Not entirely useless, but I'll still say don't bother simply because it's so freaking expensive in terms of disk space. Half of your drives, and the larger half if your drives aren't all identical, become mirrors of the other other drives. So you have half as much available storage as otherwise. Then again, if you ever have a drive die on you, your machine will still be trundling along happily.

Conclusion: Since you're doing D/V, it might be worth it to get a pair of small speedy drives in a RAID0 configuration for data that you don't need to keep for very long, while you leave your not-so-dynamic data (like programs) on a non-RAID drive. This way, your gimongous video files will benefit from RAID0, but you won't be risking all of your other data. However, if you're not working with HUGE files (I mean gigabytes...hundreds of megabytes isn't "huge"), just stick with single drive setups and save the hassle.

 

[J/-\RE|)]

What is RAID 5?

 

[guito13]

What is RAID 5?

Raid 5 is similar to raid 1 (redundancy) without the high cost (it uses parity bits i believe). Instead of using 1/2 of your drive space for backup (mirroring) you will be able to use n-1 drives for storage (where n is the total number of drives in the array).

For example, one of my comps has 3 raid 5 arrays of 6 disks each. if each disk is 10 gb then i have 60 gb total on each array. I can use n - 1, or 50 gb ,for actual data storage. If one disk goes bad you can simply replace it and the array can repair itself. If for some crazy reason 2 or more disks go at once...you are screwed.

That is a summary (and pretty much all I know of it) of raid 5. I am sure if you google 'RAID 5' you will get much better answers.

 

[Stiletto One]

STUFF

Yup.

For any given chunk of data (you can set stripe sizes in any RAID array using striping), data will get striped across all the drives but one, and the last drive gets the parity data. So if you lose any one drive in an array, you can just slap a new drive in it and rebuild—and in the meantime finish whatever it was you were doing with no data loss.

 

[guito13]

More Stuff

I beleive that if you are building a machine for strictly gaming then raid 0 is the way to go as it 'should' give you bettter performance. If you are going to keep data on the machine that is muy importante then raid 1 or 5 or (insert number here) is the way to go. Your HDD will take a performance hit using 1 or 5 (less with 5 obviously) but its a small price to pay for the sense of security.

EDIT: This may interest you http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040625/index.html

 

[GlobalFear]

For gaming you are going to want to run a athlon64. For video editing a higher end p4 with ht is your best bet. What are you doing more of? That is what you should base this on.
Raid 5 would most likly be best for you as it's alot cheaper then raid 1 and still packs the redundancy of it.

 

[Stiletto One]

More stuff

(heh.)

Anyway, the Anandtech writeup was specifically about RAID0 in common desktop/geek usages, like gaming. The CPU hit involved with using desktop RAID controllers (and the Intel ICH RAID controller's one of the better ones out there) as opposed to a "real" controller (think 3Ware Escalade class) offsets the rather miniscule gain in improving the sequential read improvements.

For a gaming box, don't bother. Put cash savings from getting, say, one 160GB drive rather than two 80GB drives into getting a better graphics card or fans or something.

RAID5 is definitely NOT cheaper than RAID1 in small deployments. A decent controller is about as expensive as a high-end graphics card. Maybe if you want redundancy for a terabyte of data, RAID5's more economical (and a hell of a lot faster), but if you're just using a handful of drives, RAID1 will actually come out cheaper.

Side note: RAID1 nets improved read performance over non-RAID, at a small write performance hit.

 

[kellog]

Just because I don't think this point had enough emphasis: make sure you get a good quality raid card! If you buy some cheap card your not going to get a noticible performance gain, plus you'll probably end up with either bios conflicts of stability issues due to bad driver design.

 

[Stiletto One]

Just because I don't think this point had enough emphasis: make sure you get a good quality raid card! If you buy some cheap card your not going to get a noticible performance gain, plus you'll probably end up with either bios conflicts of stability issues due to bad driver design.

The "point" was that RAID, even RAID0, won't help you any under normal conditions.

However, this is true: unless you're willing to shell out for a RAID controller with an onboard processor (if it's much less than $100, it probably doesn't), then your processor's doing most of the datahandling. This isn't actually a huge hit with well-written drivers, though. The main issue is simply that RAID0 doesn't help any (and can be BAD) for seek times, and most of the time, that's what gets stressed—lots of little <20MB hits. NOT multi-gigabyte sequential reads.