RAID 0 Question: which drives to use?

[Jon55]

I'm sure this question has been beaten to death, but there's a lot of misinformation out there and I know I can count on the people in this forum.

I'm considering doing RAID 0 with either two WD Caviar Black drives or two Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, in either case both would be the 1TB versions. Which option would be faster, primarily for gaming? Or are there other drives that would work better? Also, I've read (in older threads) that the 1TB WD Black drives have troubles in RAID 0? Is this still true, or true at all?

SSD's are still too expensive for me (for the capacity you get).

 

[Jon55]

Also, would SATA6 be any benefit?

 

[bastage]

I would not raid 0 1tb drives. Thats jsut asking for trouble.

It sounds like you dont already have the drives. If thats the case then i would recommend a SSD or even a pair of 1st gen SSD's in raid 0 (thats what I did to get the capacity I need). You would be much faster & more reliable this route.

 

[tiraides]

For gaming, if you could afford to, just go with a fast SSD. Use the 1TB HDD -- whichever one you choose -- for storage.

RAID 0 is a bad choice for a "primary drive" because if one drive fails, your entire RAID array is lost. Unlike other RAID configurations -- which, keep in mind, aren't backup solutions -- RAID 0 doesn't ensure HDD uptime; it only focuses on increased speed.

 

[Jon55]

For gaming, if you could afford to, just go with a fast SSD. Use the 1TB HDD -- whichever one you choose -- for storage.

RAID 0 is a bad choice for a "primary drive" because if one drive fails, your entire RAID array is lost. Unlike other RAID configurations -- which, keep in mind, aren't backup solutions -- RAID 0 doesn't ensure HDD uptime; it only focuses on increased speed.

That's what I always hear, but how is that any different than when 1 drive fails?

And SSD's are still too expensive for me (regarding price/capacity). I mean we're talking $150 for two F3 or WD Black drives or $400 for two very low capacity SSD's.

I would not raid 0 1tb drives. Thats jsut asking for trouble.

How so?

 

[Dangman]

Also, would SATA6 be any benefit?

Not unless you have a high-end SSD. For regular hard drives, no benefit whatosever from SATA6. In fact, mechanical drives are just now barely hitting the upper range of SATA 3.0Gb/s. So it's gonna be years, if any development at all, before mechnical drives need SATA 6.0Gb/s

That's what I always hear, but how is that any different than when 1 drive fails?

Well with two drives, you have two possible points of failure. Therefore you have a higher chance of failure. With a single drive, that's only one point of failure. The end results are the same but the chances between a single drive/SSD and two drives/SSD differ greatly. That's the issue that many have with RAID 0: The higher chances of failure. Doesn't necessarily mean it will happen but still.

Hope that clears up your confusion as to what everybody tends to say that.

And SSD's are still too expensive for me (regarding price/capacity). I mean we're talking $150 for two F3 or WD Black drives or $400 for two very low capacity SSD's.

I concur about the price to capacity. But a $200 Intel 80GB SSD or the $155 for a OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD would still outperform three of those F3 or WD Black drives in RAID 0.

Anyway, stick with the Samsung F3s. They're faster than the WD Black 1TBs. More than likely the RAID issues you were reading about with the 1TB WD Blacks were either of an earlier bad batch or something related to other forms of RAID, not RAID 0.

 

[master noran]

Raid 0 is not an issue if you have an external drive or even a third hard drive in your pc for backups.

 

[E4g1e]

That's what I always hear, but how is that any different than when 1 drive fails?

This is because as a system drive, all of the system and program files are spead out over the two drives in that RAID 0. So, if one drive goes bad, the entire RAID 0 array becomes completely unusable. This will force you to reformat the one good drive just to even reuse. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover the data from a degraded or failed RAID 0 array (and "successful" recovery of data from all of the disks in a failed RAID 0 array will cost hundreds, if not thousands, of times more money than you spent for the entire rig) - much, much more difficult than a failed single drive because fragments of a data file reside on one drive while the rest are on the other drive.

Anyway, stick with the Samsung F3s. They're faster than the WD Black 1TBs. More than likely the RAID issues you were reading about with the 1TB WD Blacks were either of an earlier bad batch or something related to other forms of RAID, not RAID 0.

Actually, all of the newer batches of the WD Black manufactured since late 2009 suffer from the same RAID issue (and yes, it affects ALL levels of RAID, not just the higher ones). WD has permanently disabled TLER in these drives, so that the disks will always spin themselves down no matter what (and the drives take much too long to spin back up to speed). That behavior, in turn, will cause the RAID controller to report that the drives in the array have "degraded" or "failed" even though they are actually still "good"! As a result, WD has forced you to purchase the RE series of drives (which now cost nearly double per GB as the regular desktop WDs) just to even use them in a RAID array.

 

[bastage]

You actually have 3 points of failure with a raid 0. Either drive & the raid controller. & No it does not cost 400 bucks for 2 low capacity SSD's.. Infaact I paid a total of 325 for 2x 80gb Intel's & there a speedy drive. You can get a good 60gb drive for just over 100 & then add a single Mechanical drive for storage & then you have capacity & speed as well as more reliability for not much more money.

 

[E4g1e]

You actually have 3 points of failure with a raid 0. Either drive & the raid controller.

For that matter, there are not one - but two - points of failure in a single-drive system: The drive and the controller that the drive is connected to.

 

[Jon55]

Not unless you have a high-end SSD. For regular hard drives, no benefit whatosever from SATA6. In fact, mechanical drives are just now barely hitting the upper range of SATA 3.0Gb/s. So it's gonna be years, if any development at all, before mechnical drives need SATA 6.0Gb/s

Well with two drives, you have two possible points of failure. Therefore you have a higher chance of failure. With a single drive, that's only one point of failure. The end results are the same but the chances between a single drive/SSD and two drives/SSD differ greatly. That's the issue that many have with RAID 0: The higher chances of failure. Doesn't necessarily mean it will happen but still.

Hope that clears up your confusion as to what everybody tends to say that.


I concur about the price to capacity. But a $200 Intel 80GB SSD or the $155 for a OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD would still outperform three of those F3 or WD Black drives in RAID 0.

Oh I know the awesomeness of SSD's, but I'd still be left with 60 or 80 GB, and sorry that is just a pitiful amount. Fortunately they're only getting better. And regarding the SATA6, that's pretty much what I figured, but wanted to be sure.

Thanks for all the info guys. I really appreciate it. I think I'll probably go with the two F3's, as I already have a storage drive and backup regularly, so I'm not worried about that. And with that factor taken out, I see no real downside to this. Again, thank you guys.

 

[martinje]

Jon55 Im building something similar to you,
I will have 1 SSD as my OS drive
and 2 1 TB hd in raid 0 as my gaming/work drive.

Dont get WD black, WD digital made a firmware change that screws with them when you raid them. Ill stick with the Samsung F3. Thats what I will be getting also.

 

[spine]

+1 for the Samsungs.

Got a pair of 500gbs in RAID-0 and it screams. Beats cheap SSD performance, comes at a fraction of the price and obviously gives way more storage space. Quiet drives too.

And yeah, I'd say stay away from WD drives. Working in a tech support company I've seen way too many of them come back with bad sectors. Seriously, of all the drives we've had come in that were physically bad, easily 90%+ were WDs. Their RMA customer service maybe 2nd to none, but that doesn't make up for inferior hardware IMHO.

And ignore the FUD on RAID-0 unreliability. The only people that harp on about it are those who haven't raided themselves and are talking theoretically (no offence to anyone). I've been 'raiding' for years now and not lost any data at all, ever. I've even had drives go bad in an array and I've just partitioned off the bad sectors and carried on just fine. Just take extra care to keep your drives cool (a dedicated fan is a must + good case airflow) and you'll be fine.

 

[master noran]

This is because as a system drive, all of the system and program files are spead out over the two drives in that RAID 0. So, if one drive goes bad, the entire RAID 0 array becomes completely unusable. This will force you to reformat the one good drive just to even reuse. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover the data from a degraded or failed RAID 0 array (and "successful" recovery of data from all of the disks in a failed RAID 0 array will cost hundreds, if not thousands, of times more money than you spent for the entire rig) - much, much more difficult than a failed single drive because fragments of a data file reside on one drive while the rest are on the other drive.



Actually, all of the newer batches of the WD Black manufactured since late 2009 suffer from the same RAID issue (and yes, it affects ALL levels of RAID, not just the higher ones). WD has permanently disabled TLER in these drives, so that the disks will always spin themselves down no matter what (and the drives take much too long to spin back up to speed). That behavior, in turn, will cause the RAID controller to report that the drives in the array have "degraded" or "failed" even though they are actually still "good"! As a result, WD has forced you to purchase the RE series of drives (which now cost nearly double per GB as the regular desktop WDs) just to even use them in a RAID array.

Raid 0 works fine without TLER, not a big issue.

 

[Dangman]

Actually, all of the newer batches of the WD Black manufactured since late 2009 suffer from the same RAID issue (and yes, it affects ALL levels of RAID, not just the higher ones). WD has permanently disabled TLER in these drives, so that the disks will always spin themselves down no matter what (and the drives take much too long to spin back up to speed). That behavior, in turn, will cause the RAID controller to report that the drives in the array have "degraded" or "failed" even though they are actually still "good"! As a result, WD has forced you to purchase the RE series of drives (which now cost nearly double per GB as the regular desktop WDs) just to even use them in a RAID array.

Really, the lack of TLER actually affects RAID 0 and RAID 1? First I've heard of this TBH.

 

[E4g1e]

Really, the lack of TLER actually affects RAID 0 and RAID 1? First I've heard of this TBH.

Yes, and I had personally experienced this several times (specifically, the Intel RAID utility reported the Blacks as "degraded" every time they spin themselves down, and then taking much too long to spin back up) before I ditched the Blacks from the RAID. Because of what I experienced, I find the Blacks suitable only as single, non-RAID drives.

 

[Dangman]

Yes, and I had personally experienced this several times before I ditched the Blacks from the RAID. Because of what I experienced, I find the Blacks suitable only as single, non-RAID drives.

Ahh darn. Thanks for the clarification! Well not like I recommended Black drives that much in the first place. Just another reason not to recommend them.

 

[Jon55]

And ignore the FUD on RAID-0 unreliability. The only people that harp on about it are those who haven't raided themselves and are talking theoretically (no offence to anyone). I've been 'raiding' for years now and not lost any data at all, ever. I've even had drives go bad in an array and I've just partitioned off the bad sectors and carried on just fine. Just take extra care to keep your drives cool (a dedicated fan is a must + good case airflow) and you'll be fine.

Yeah I really don't get it either. I mean ok, there's two drives now instead of one. But so what? If I got one drive and it failed, I would still have lost all my data. The only downside to having two is buy the second drive. If one drive fails in RAID 0, I'll still have the one drive.

Also, I've had nothing but good times with WD drives, especially their Black series. Sorry to hear everyone else here is having a bad time with them.

 

[E4g1e]

Yeah I really don't get it either. I mean ok, there's two drives now instead of one. But so what? If I got one drive and it failed, I would still have lost all my data. The only downside to having two is buy the second drive. If one drive fails in RAID 0, I'll still have the one drive.

Also, I've had nothing but good times with WD drives, especially their Black series. Sorry to hear everyone else here is having a bad time with them.

Actually, you'd still lose all of your data on the second drive when one drive in a RAID 0 array fails. And once the one drive fails, data recovery becomes that much more difficult with a RAID 0 array because chunks of the same data file are scattered across the two drives in a random pattern.

And if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails, you cannot just reattach the good drive and use that - that will not work at all. Instead, you must competely re-partition and reformat that hard drive before you can use it again. As a result, I use a RAID 0 array only as a secondary drive volume for media editing/encoding/transcoding work.

And as I noted earlier, the WD Blacks manufactured since Fall 2009 have had their TLER permanently disabled by the manufacturer - and cannot be re-enabled at all by the user because there is no firmware updates available at all whatsoever from WD for that series of drives. This means that the only "good" WD Blacks for use in a RAID array are those drives manufactured prior to September 2009.

 

[bastage]

Man if you really want to run a raid array for increased performance then I am not saying not to. But if you need 2 TB of data then I am sure the lions share is storage. So use a 1.5 or 2tb drive for storage & raid 2 smaller drives like the 320gb Samsung f4 drives.

 

[Jon55]

Actually, you'd still lose all of your data on the second drive when one drive in a RAID 0 array fails. And once the one drive fails, data recovery becomes that much more difficult with a RAID 0 array because chunks of the same data file are scattered across the two drives in a random pattern.

And if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails, you cannot just reattach the good drive and use that - that will not work at all. Instead, you must competely re-partition and reformat that hard drive before you can use it again. As a result, I use a RAID 0 array only as a secondary drive volume for media editing/encoding/transcoding work.

Oh I know I'd still lose all the data in either case, what I mean was I'd still have one working drive.

 

[E4g1e]

Oh I know I'd still lose all the data in either case, what I mean was I'd still have one working drive.

No problem. I was trying to clarify what you said previously.