Raid 0

N

NukeULater

Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2006
Messages
917
Hello everyone,

I was wondering if I could take my two current Seagate 500GB hard drives and use them in Raid 0 for better performance. I currently have only programs games and the OS on one of the drives the other is just sitting there doing nothing. All of my data is on my other two 1.5Tb seagates.

Is there any way of installing raid 0 without having to reinstall the OS? Sorry if this is a noobish question, it's just that I haven't messed with raid ever before.

Thanks.

***Specs are in my sig.
 
It's probably doable, but you would need to install the RAID drivers, back up the OS partition, create the array, restore the OS to the array, cross your fingers.....

Or just create the array, reinstall your apps, and have a nice fast new hard drive array with a nice clean and quick copy of windows.

I always reinstall a clean copy of Windows, accept when I recently updated the hard drive in my work laptop to a SSD. I don't have all the install stuff for the work laptop ad didnt' feel like sending it in.

Don
 
NukeULater said:
Is raid 0 even worth installing?
Click to expand...

No. No performance gain at all for day to day tasks or games. It only speeds up writing large files to disk.
It's all hype. Most people look at synthetic benchmarks and get excited but they don't really mean squat. When you look at real world benchmarks you'll see that RAID 0, in day to day usage for the average user, is no faster than most single drives. In same cases it can be slower.
 
I run Intel Matrix RAID 0 on both my desktop and my gaming rig. Is the difference noticable? WHen I'm working with large files, i.e. encoding, video editing, photoshop yes it is noticable. Day to day internet surfing and even when gaming, no, not really.
 
Personally I would disagree with the comments about no gaming performance increase, I noticed quit a bit of a boost using Raid 0 and playing MMO's. LOTRO had it's load times reduced considerably and "hitching" almost eliminated after switching over. The same however cannot be said in regards to FPS's like Half Life 2 where I noticed little if any major improvement.
 
jmet said:
Personally I would disagree with the comments about no gaming performance increase, I noticed quit a bit of a boost using Raid 0 and playing MMO's. LOTRO had it's load times reduced considerably and "hitching" almost eliminated after switching over. The same however cannot be said in regards to FPS's like Half Life 2 where I noticed little if any major improvement.
Click to expand...

By "gaming performance", it's usually referring to Frames Per Second, not load times. I've never seen a RAID0 setup actually increase FPS at all. But RAID0 does improve load times. How much of an improved time depends on the game, the raided drives, what the speed of the previous drives were, etc.
 
Raid 0 is definitely noticeable, I used to run a 4x160GB Raptor stripe on my box at home and recently sold 3 drives to get an SSD, well I have been running on a solo raptor for the time being and it is WAY noticeably slower. I have also ran many boxes on two drive raptor stripes and they are also quite a bit faster than the single drive setup... It depends what you do I guess, I don't game I mostly program and stuff, several copies of Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, MySQL server & client apps, many Firefox windows and usually IE windows too....
 
Well most of the time my PC is used for photoshop. Often my files are 1-2GB in size. Content creation is my thing. So I would see a performance increase while using raid 0? I also plan on trying some VM's over the summer.

I only game once in a while. I wouldn't run raid 0 just to improve my load times, I'm already happy with that.

Again sorry, I am a noob when it comes to raid.
 
Day to day tasks are mainly affected by the drive's speed when doing small random reads. RAID 0 improves performance when doing large sequential reads, but has little to no effect on small random reads. That said, RAID 0 certainly won't hurt your performance.

You may be able to migrate your installation to a RAID 0 array without reinstalling. I have never done this before, but you will need to install the RAID drivers first (if they aren't installed already), then you could image the drive to another location. From there you set up the RAID array and write the image on to the array and hope everything worked. If it doesn't work you could still break the array and put the image back on a single drive like nothing happened.
 
Okay, I just finished installing raid 0, it went surprisingly easy. I wasn't expecting that.

Thanks for all your help. It is greatly appreciated. :)
 
Glad to hear your RAID setup went so easily. I hope you'll get back to us as to whether or not you found it worthwhile.

Just want to mention something else -

Archer75 said:
No. No performance gain at all for day to day tasks or games. It only speeds up writing large files to disk.
It's all hype. Most people look at synthetic benchmarks and get excited but they don't really mean squat. When you look at real world benchmarks you'll see that RAID 0, in day to day usage for the average user, is no faster than most single drives. In same cases it can be slower.
Click to expand...

I don't mean to pick on Archer here, but the tone of his post is definitive and condescending while the contents are wildly inaccurate. His/her comment represents a fundamental lack of understanding of the technology and should be disregarded, in my opinion.

Archer75 said:
It only speeds up writing large files to disk.
Click to expand...

RAID0 speeds up reads as well as writes. RAID0 has no parity or redundancy built in, so there is very little overhead. It achieves performance increases by parallelising IO requests to the drives. As such, it also scales very well. So, for example, if each disk has a maximum read speed of 100MB/s, two disks in a RAID0 stripe will approach 200MB/s reads. Similarly, if write speeds are 100MB/s, two disks in a RAID0 stripe will approach 200MB/s writes. The performance increase will be more noticeable on large sequential reads/writes where access/seek time and fragmentation is less of a factor. The trade off for this performance is a single drive failure causes the entire array to fail.

Archer75 said:
It's all hype. Most people look at synthetic benchmarks and get excited but they don't really mean squat. When you look at real world benchmarks you'll see that RAID 0, in day to day usage for the average user, is no faster than most single drives.
Click to expand...

Certainly not all hype, that is to say, unless you don't consider booting/waking from sleep in nearly half the time, textures/load times from games in nearly half the time, application launches in half the time, and general file performance at nearly double rate to be real world applications.

Archer75 said:
When you look at real world benchmarks you'll see that RAID 0, in day to day usage for the average user, is no faster than most single drives. In same cases it can be slower. In same cases it can be slower
Click to expand...

RAID0 will never be slower than a single drive in the array. The speed of the array will, however, be limited by the slowest drive in the array. Granted, RAID0 is not a wunderkind, it is still limited by the type of disks in use - a RAID0 of UDMA33 disks is not going to outperform a single 3Gbps SATA disk, modern disks outperform older ones, etc. If you're looking at benchmarks where your RAID0 is being outperformed by single spindle of like drives, that benchmark probably has little to nothing to do with IO.

Other RAID levels certainly suffer from a performance "penalty", but that is only in writes due to parity calculations (RAID 5 or 6, for example), duplication (RAID 1, for example); they still benefit from read performance due to their parallel nature unless the array is in a degraded state.

In short, RAID0 offers scaling performance increases to one of the most limiting factors in your machine. If you can live with the increased data risks, the performance reward is certainly worthwhile.
 
I understand RAID 0 is one of those subjects. People either swear by it or say it does nothing.

All I can say is look at real world benchmarks and get back to me. They are all consistent and all show the same thing. Day to day use for the average computer user or gamer. No change in performance or perhaps minor changes. Half the time? Not even close. Not on a single real world benchmark.

I have even tested myself using a 2nd drive that was an exact match of the single drive I had been using and on a highpoint rocketraid card. Boot times where no faster. Game load times were no faster. Level load times were no faster. All consistent with the real time benchmarks i've read.
I then tried the onboard controller and results in some areas were a little worse.

Trust me, if RAID 0 gave me noticeable improvements I would be running it. I would be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. I have got the hard drives of all types and sizes.

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2974&p=5
Level load times .4 - 1 second faster?

"All of those results sound very impressive but in the balance of our application and game tests we only noticed a 2%~3% performance difference between RAID 0 and single drive configurations. Unless you extract files, copy or move them on the same drive, and encode all day long then the benefits of RAID 0 on the typical consumer desktop is not worth the price of admission."
"However, we still do not think RAID 0 is worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer,"
 
Last edited:
I too look forward to hearing if the OP finds that RAID-0 improves performance of his system. One more thing to think about is that RAID-0 is inherently risky. You multiply your chances of total loss by a factor equal to the number of drives you have in the array. Back up any data you consider valuable!
 
coo-coo-clocker said:
I too look forward to hearing if the OP finds that RAID-0 improves performance of his system. One more thing to think about is that RAID-0 is inherently risky. You multiply your chances of total loss by a factor equal to the number of drives you have in the array. Back up any data you consider valuable!
Click to expand...
Already have. ;) That is what my dual 1.5TB drives are for.

I'm still getting everything setup so don't expect any benchmarks right now.
 
Okay a couple benchmarks against my Seagate 1.TB drives. The dual 500GB drives are on the top left. I don't think it's to shabby. :)

HD_TACH.jpg


I have noticed large differences when working on large files in photoshop or similar programs. Thanks for the help everyone. I think it was a worthwhile move. :D
 
so would it be better to get 2 300 GB SATA II hard drives in RAID0 or to get 1 640GB SATA II hard drive?...in terms of performance which would offer me the best?...and by best I mean in terms of gaming performance and everyday desktop use/internet surfing/Office 2007 etc...I don't do any video editing
 
If you're not dealing with large files often, then no, raid0 (or any raid for that matter) is not for you. It'll help with loading time in games, but not much in terms of fps. Window will load a bit faster, so that's the only 'everyday' performance increase you'll notice.
 
argoth said:
Glad to hear your RAID setup went so easily. I hope you'll get back to us as to whether or not you found it worthwhile.

Just want to mention something else -



I don't mean to pick on Archer here, but the tone of his post is definitive and condescending while the contents are wildly inaccurate. His/her comment represents a fundamental lack of understanding of the technology and should be disregarded, in my opinion.



RAID0 speeds up reads as well as writes. RAID0 has no parity or redundancy built in, so there is very little overhead. It achieves performance increases by parallelising IO requests to the drives. As such, it also scales very well. So, for example, if each disk has a maximum read speed of 100MB/s, two disks in a RAID0 stripe will approach 200MB/s reads. Similarly, if write speeds are 100MB/s, two disks in a RAID0 stripe will approach 200MB/s writes. The performance increase will be more noticeable on large sequential reads/writes where access/seek time and fragmentation is less of a factor. The trade off for this performance is a single drive failure causes the entire array to fail.



Certainly not all hype, that is to say, unless you don't consider booting/waking from sleep in nearly half the time, textures/load times from games in nearly half the time, application launches in half the time, and general file performance at nearly double rate to be real world applications.



RAID0 will never be slower than a single drive in the array. The speed of the array will, however, be limited by the slowest drive in the array. Granted, RAID0 is not a wunderkind, it is still limited by the type of disks in use - a RAID0 of UDMA33 disks is not going to outperform a single 3Gbps SATA disk, modern disks outperform older ones, etc. If you're looking at benchmarks where your RAID0 is being outperformed by single spindle of like drives, that benchmark probably has little to nothing to do with IO.

Other RAID levels certainly suffer from a performance "penalty", but that is only in writes due to parity calculations (RAID 5 or 6, for example), duplication (RAID 1, for example); they still benefit from read performance due to their parallel nature unless the array is in a degraded state.

In short, RAID0 offers scaling performance increases to one of the most limiting factors in your machine. If you can live with the increased data risks, the performance reward is certainly worthwhile.
Click to expand...
half your post looks like you copied it from a "RAID for noobies" article and the other half is complete bullshit
games loading in half the time :LOL:
 
argoth said:
Certainly not all hype, that is to say, unless you don't consider booting/waking from sleep in nearly half the time, textures/load times from games in nearly half the time, application launches in half the time, and general file performance at nearly double rate to be real world applications.
Click to expand...

If you have hard numbers backing this up, whether they're from your own testing or some other source, i would very much like to see it.
edit: i wanted to emphasize that, by numbers, i meant the times for application loading, booting, and game loading. I really don't care to see any "general file performance" numbers.
 
OP glad to hear it went well for you.
Personally I swear by R0, and thats all I run on my workstation...then again its all backed up every night, and I am dealing with 30+gb files, and doing encoding 24/7.
So for me its R0 or bust on these boxes.

On my normal/average person boxes I just get the fast single drive that has the capacity I need for a given use.

Whoever above talking about game/app loads twice as fast because of R0...is full of shit. That has nothing to do with sequential reads, and is really all about access times. If you just need as OS disk thats fast for quick OS loads, app loads etc....get a SSD like a vertex, or Intel.

But yea just for the record...from a guy who runs R0, it DOES NOT make your *avg user's* computing experience faster.
 
My experiences with RAID are this:
RAID0 will provide some noticeable speed increase across the board...at least with my old ATA133 drives. That was years ago when the average speeds were far below theoretical speeds.

Even still, while the increase was fun to note and exciting when I didn't have anything important on my computer, I would never consider it anymore for a few reasons.

The main problem is that if something happens to a drive, the whole array is dead. The other problem that no one has mentioned yet is that nearly all of the time regular users are RAIDing drives they are using the built in raid controllers on their motherboards. I don't know if it's still the case, but back when I was dinking around with RAID once you take them off the controller the array is broken.

That is, if one drive fails, if your motherboard fails, if you upgrade your motherboard, your data is gone. Irrecoverably and irrevocably gone.

The much safer option is to use RAID1, which still has some of the performance increases when reading data (not writing) because the data is mirrored across two disks. The controller can read data from both disks simultaneously and yet the user still retains redundancy in case of a failure. The controller on the motherboard is still the weak link in this chain, both in terms of failure or driver support.

I found that in windows, without a dedicated RAID controller, the benefits of software RAID were significantly outweighed by the risks. I looked for a hardware controller for a while but after reading far too many reviews, I realized that unless I could find a really good used one, the performance increases were just not there. If you spend a few hundred bucks on a dedicated controller, then you might find RAID worth the risk and cost.

On my linux server, however, I use RAID5 that is software controlled (from the OS and not the onboard controller) and the overhead seems to not be too severe. I recommend RAID for redundancy, not speed. Speed can be gained in a more complex RAID array with enough drives.

The only way I would see RAID0 being useful in windows even for someone who would traditionally benefit from RAID0 is by using it for temp/scratch/pagefile. Any gains you are seeing now will be offset/negated by the one time a single drive goes down and you have to reinstall windows and all of your programs and restore your data. Or you could ghost your 500gb to your 1.5tb drives...although at that point you're wasting so much storage for such incremental gains (and the time cost of ghosting the data) that you might as well get 2 small drives and RAID0 those for your photoshop scratch and enjoy the gains where you want them with essentially no risk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top