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Raid 0 - Is it Worth it?

W

w0lf42

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
77
After reading a discussion on Anandtech, it seems to me that Raid0 doesn't offer much (if any) performance gain. They finish their review with the following quotation:
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.
Click to expand...

Being that I don't require more than 70GB (I save all of my documents to an external drive), I was thinking of either getting dropping $135.00 for a WD Raptor 74GB or shopping around for a deal (e.g. Maxtor SATA 200GB for $70.00).

Here's what my upgrade consists of (I'm waiting to see if CPU prices to drop before I order one):

Is the review on Anandtech acurate? Am I better off getting the Raptor?
 
Your quote from Anandtech is accurate and to answer your 1st question: no Raid-O is not worth it.

Whether or not the raptor is right for you depends on what you're looking for. Since you already have a storage drive, I assume you're considering the Raptor for your OS and programs. In that case, nothing beats the raptor and as many others can testify, the performance difference between a Raptor and typical SATA drives is noticeable. If you can afford it, you'll be happier with the Raptor.
 
The only time I’ve ever found Raid-0 to be really useful was when I set up two 200g drives in raid-0 for large file transfers over gigabit. The transfer times were greatly reduced. I tried going from a single raptor to two in raid-0 for my boot but did not really notice anything more than a slight speed increase. When I took those two same drives and used one for OS/Apps and the other just for games I noticed an even bigger improvement than when I was using raid.
 
It depends on your application. RAID 0 is worth it to me because otherwise I'd have no place to store some of my files and databases: they're in the hundreds of gigabytes.

The increased risk doesn't bother me, since they're recreatable. (Not always easily or conveniently, but the data is certainly replaceable.)

If you require the storage of very large files and the data is replaceable or you have an excellent back up strategy, I don't see any reason to avoid RAID 0.

If you're just doing this for your desktop machine and general-purpose use, it seems like you'd have other alternatives and better ways to spend your money. (For instance, I'd tune the network before I changed the machines to use RAID 0 instead of individual drives.)
 
well, considering your video card choice, I would assume that you are gaming quite a bit on that PC. For that reason, no raid is not worth it. Get yourself a single raptor, as long as it is not the 36GB version.
 
My pr0n is on a 4x300gig raid-0 array (Maxtor DiamondMax 10's w16mb cache) and browsing through the pictures folder is literally twice as fast then when I had the files on a jbod setup, though I am using a real raid card and not nvidia's onboard software raid.

cable.management.01.jpg
 
kuyaglen said:
My pr0n is on a 4x300gig raid-0 array (Maxtor DiamondMax 10's w16mb cache) and browsing through the pictures folder is literally twice as fast then when I had the files on a jbod setup, though I am using a real raid card and not nvidia's onboard software raid.
http://www.glencastillo.com/images/cable.management.01.jpg[/img]
Click to expand...


hey it looks cool as hell at least, JBOD tends to slow thing down to even slow than a singal drive.

Nice raid controller though! how much ram you got in it? Are your sure its a true hardware?
 
I(illa Bee said:
Nice raid controller though! how much ram you got in it? Are your sure its a true hardware?
Click to expand...

Promise SX4000 Lite w/ 256mb pc133
 
kuyaglen said:
Promise SX4000 Lite w/ 256mb pc133
Click to expand...

That's pretty much a real RAID controller. :D
But I think that the Lite designator means that it doesn't have a hardware XOR engine on it like the full version SX4000 or SX6000 does.
If I'm right, that means that the PC133 is primarilary cache and the calculations are off-loaded to the system CPU. Still a helluva lot better than an onboard IDE RAID controller.


 
rodsfree said:
That's pretty much a real RAID controller. :D
But I think that the Lite designator means that it doesn't have a hardware XOR engine on it like the full version SX4000 or SX6000 does.
If I'm right, that means that the PC133 is primarilary cache and the calculations are off-loaded to the system CPU. Still a helluva lot better than an onboard IDE RAID controller.


Click to expand...


considering that he is using RAID-0, the point you are trying to make doesn't exist:
kuyaglen said:
My pr0n is on a 4x300gig raid-0 array (Maxtor DiamondMax 10's w16mb cache) ...
Click to expand...
[my emphasis]
 
drizzt81 said:
considering that he is using RAID-0, the point you are trying to make doesn't exist:
[my emphasis]
Click to expand...

Wasn't trying to make any point.....
Some people don't consider a RAID controller that doesn't have a hardware XOR engine to not be a REAL RAID controller. There are actually some reviews that place this type of controller just a little ahead of a software RAID array. Seeing as how both of them require the host CPU to perform all the required calculations.

And yes, calculations are required for a RAID 0 array, just not parity calculations. Or is the build time required just because the controller is getting to know the drives?


 
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