• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Raid 0

S

Slo Gun

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 10, 2005
Messages
302
Hi i am new to raid and have a few questions, any feedback would be appreciated.
Do you still get all the capacity of the hard drives, i.e if you put 2 80 gig hard drives in raid, will that give you 160 gig, or does the raid half it?
Will it drastically reduce loading times, e.g. games, windows boot etc.
Do the 2 hard drives have to be matching in terms of make and model, aswell as size?
Is it easy to set up?
Any other pros/cons?
Overall is it worth it?

Thanks
 
Do you still get all the capacity of the hard drives?
If you go with a level 0 array, capacity is combined (80 + 80 = 160)
Level 1 would give you 1/2 the space of the array members (2 x 80 = 80, 4 x 80 = 160, etc)
Level 5 you only loose 1 drive worth of space but there is a 3 drive minimum
Level 10 (0+1) is also 1/2 the space and requires 4 drives

Will it drastically reduce loading times, e.g. games, windows boot etc?
Depends. A few games show a performance increase but most do not. Any boost in windows boot is effectively nullified by having to sit through the controller bios at post.

Do the 2 hard drives have to be matching in terms of make and model, aswell as size?
Nope. You will however only 'see' the capacity of the smallest drive. In other words if you have an 80GB and a 60GB they are both seen as 60's (when added to the array).

Is it easy to set up?
Very.

Any other pros/cons?
level 0
Pros - boosts the speed of sequential transfers, allows you to combine multiple drives into one larger volume.
Cons - loose one drive and everything is gone, one controller hiccup and everything is gone, typical desktop usage does not consist of large sequential transfers, seek time increases, some applications will actually take a performance hit
level everything else :)
Pros - allows you to sustain a drive failure, some produce a similar read/write performance boost as level 0.
Cons - a loss of at least one drive worth of space, slower write speed (level 5), greater expense for less space.

Overall is it worth it?
Only you can decide that ;) Read through the [H] raid faq in my sig for more info. While level 0 wins all the benchmarks, real world usage does not mirror that of synthetic benchies. A/V editing is where a level 0 array really shines.
 
Ok, RAID0 will read/write data to both drives. It's stripes the data across both, meaning you do not get 80+80gb of storage, you only have 80gb. The drives need to be the same size, ideally the same make and model. It's bad mojo to mix drives in any RAID configuration.

You will see an increase in performance, as it is reading and writting to two drives. Of course, if you use software RAID, you'll see a large increase in CPU consumption. It's best to use hardware for RAID, as it takes the load off the CPU.

RAID is easy to set up, given you have the hardware for it.

The pro's as I see it are this: an increase in HDD performance.
The con's as I see it are this: you are doubling your chance of HDD failure. If either disk fails, all of your data will be gone. Also there is the fact that you are literally paying twice as much per GB on your HDD's, since you have to purchase two. There is also the possibility of needing to purchase hardware to support it, or having to install software to run the RAID.

Overall, if you are looking for an increase in performance, sure, go for it. Personally, I don't use any RAID that doesn't support backups. My personal favorite is RAID5, which stripes data across three or more drives, and stores the parity data on multiple drives, meaning that the odds of complete failure are extremely low, as data can be recovered from multiple disks.

::EDIT:: DAmn, beaten by one minute.
 
RAID-0 does not automatically increase desktop application level storage performance (reduce load times in games, get into levels faster, etc). RAID-0 arrays are extremely sensitive to the number of seeks in a given access patterns, as well as the length of transfers. For straight linear reads/writes, such as disk-to-disk backup and saving/loading files in programs like Photoshop, RAID-0 can increase performance 50% or more. However, in applications that have large numbers of seeks on numerous small files (loading games and programs, etc), RAID-0 returns are much smaller. A RAID-0 array may even be slower than a single disk in such situations, due to increased rotational latency and additional driver/BIOS overhead.

If you are basing your decision to go with RAID-0 based on HDTach results that a buddy showed you or you saw in a HDD "review," you need to reconsider. HDTach, Sandra, ATTO, and IOMeter are synthetic diagnostic benchmarks, not actual measures of desktop storage performance in applications. A larger drive with a bigger and smarter buffer will deliver better sotrage performance than two slower drives in RAID-0, running RAID of any sort has numerous pitfalls, and SLED (Single Large Expensive Drive) is the best choice for most desktop users.
 
ok guys thanks for all your feedback.
Thats been a big help.
I think i mite give it a miss for various reasons.
i was hoping it would benefit in terms of game loading times, but apparantly not.
It doesnt seem like i would have much use for it.
once again thanks for your indepth replies much appreciated!
 
Sieravor said:
Ok, RAID0 will read/write data to both drives. It's stripes the data across both, meaning you do not get 80+80gb of storage, you only have 80gb. The drives need to be the same size, ideally the same make and model. It's bad mojo to mix drives in any RAID configuration.
Click to expand...
Not sure what he means there. If you have 2 identical 80GB HDDs in RAID 0, it will give you 160GB of total storage on what appears to be one physical drive.

This is a good guide to the different types of RAID:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel0-c.html
 
Sieravor said:
Ok, RAID0 will read/write data to both drives. It's stripes the data across both, meaning you do not get 80+80gb of storage, you only have 80gb.

My personal favorite is RAID5, which stripes data across three or more drives, and stores the parity data on multiple drives, meaning that the odds of complete failure are extremely low, as data can be recovered from multiple disks.

::EDIT:: DAmn, beaten by one minute.
Click to expand...

First off, with raid 0, you get all of the storage. 2 80gb drives striped together will give you 160gb.

Second, with raid 5, the array can recover if *one* drive in the array fails. If you lose two, you are still SOL.
 
Yeah, sorry, went retarded for a moment. heh, it's been a long week. I think i'm goign to get some more sleep before I offer anymore advice today.
 
Sieravor said:
Yeah, sorry, went retarded for a moment. heh, it's been a long week. I think i'm goign to get some more sleep before I offer anymore advice today.
Click to expand...

Brain farts are a dangerous thing,... don't let them happen to you! ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top