RAID 1 on ICH10R, worth it?

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Bakku

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 3, 2004
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Does it worth the trouble to setup RAID 1 on my Gigabyte UD3P board? I have never setup a RAID configuration before and I have some questions about it.

My knowledge about RAID 1:
- doubles read speed
- slightly slower or same write speed (due to redundant write)
- fail-safe against disk failure up to certain extend
is there any advantage/disadvantage I overlooked?

Will I feel the increased speed in everyday usage?
How difficult it is to "uninstall" RAID setup?
and, most importantly, how difficult it is to transfer OS to another disk if I decided to upgrade my HDD drive in the future?
 
hmm...I'm not much of a RAID person myself. Try it before but it was too much trouble so I gave up. My suggestion is to get PCIe x16 ssd. Try google them :)
 
Will I feel the increased speed in everyday usage?
Click to expand...

Probably not

How difficult it is to "uninstall" RAID setup?
Click to expand...

Raid 1 is very easy to uninstall. Since it is a straight up mirror of the other drive you can break the mirror and boot a single drive. Any of the other raids are not so easy.

how difficult it is to transfer OS to another disk if I decided to upgrade my HDD drive in the future?
Click to expand...

With raid 1 that is not an issue because you use a single drive in the mirror to transfer the OS. The cloning software only needs to be able to clone the single drive. The RAID in a raid1 is somewhat irrelevant when transferring the OS.
 
Bakku said:
Does it worth the trouble to setup RAID 1 on my Gigabyte UD3P board? I have never setup a RAID configuration before and I have some questions about it.

My knowledge about RAID 1:
- doubles read speed
- slightly slower or same write speed (due to redundant write)
- fail-safe against disk failure up to certain extend
is there any advantage/disadvantage I overlooked?

Will I feel the increased speed in everyday usage?
How difficult it is to "uninstall" RAID setup?
and, most importantly, how difficult it is to transfer OS to another disk if I decided to upgrade my HDD drive in the future?
Click to expand...

RAID1 does NOT double read speed. RAID0 does.

There is little to no performance gain going with RAID1. It is simply for redundancy/mission critical/uptime/high availability.
 
Brahmzy said:
RAID1 does NOT double read speed. RAID0 does.

There is little to no performance gain going with RAID1. It is simply for redundancy/mission critical/uptime/high availability.
Click to expand...

I just did a Google search and the answer I got was RAID1 does double read speed and halves access time. It seems logical that it would because with RAID 1 it can be reading the data off both drives at the same time since the data is mirrored. RAID 0 offers the large performance advantage though due to the fact it takes a lot longer to write data than it does to read it and with RAID0 you split up the file and stripe it across both drives when writing whereas with RAID1 you have to write the full amount of data to both drives.
 
burningrave101 said:
I just did a Google search and the answer I got was RAID1 does double read speed and halves access time. It seems logical that it would because with RAID 1 it can be reading the data off both drives at the same time since the data is mirrored. RAID 0 offers the large performance advantage though due to the fact it takes a lot longer to write data than it does to read it and with RAID0 you split up the file and stripe it across both drives when writing whereas with RAID1 you have to write the full amount of data to both drives.
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Theoretically if the RAID controller is setup to do it this way. But if you do any performance benchmark searches you will see that really, none of them do and especially not chipset based RAID.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=890&page=5
http://techreport.com/articles.x/2525/3
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/4
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=484&page=1
 
yea, it doesn't seem to have a lot of performance increase from looking at those benchmarks. will it make a difference if i setup raid on the Gigabyte SATA2 chip? is it right to say that Intel's ICH10R is software based and the Gigabyte SATA2 chip is hardware based?
 
Bakku said:
yea, it doesn't seem to have a lot of performance increase from looking at those benchmarks. will it make a difference if i setup raid on the Gigabyte SATA2 chip? is it right to say that Intel's ICH10R is software based and the Gigabyte SATA2 chip is hardware based?
Click to expand...

if its onboard and not a server/workstation board its software based usually.
 
Bakku said:
is it right to say that Intel's ICH10R is software based and the Gigabyte SATA2 chip is hardware based?
Click to expand...

As OmegaAvenger said, both are software based. In fact, you'll rarely find any consumer level motherboard with hardware based RAID.
 
gotcha! so is it safe to say that the performance gain on a RAID 1 setup probably is not worth the the cost and effort? I am trying to avoid a RAID 0 setup as it's failure prompt and I know it would be a headache if I want to transfer the OS to a new drive in the future.
 
Bakku said:
gotcha! so is it safe to say that the performance gain on a RAID 1 setup probably is not worth the the cost and effort? I am trying to avoid a RAID 0 setup as it's failure prompt and I know it would be a headache if I want to transfer the OS to a new drive in the future.
Click to expand...

If you want a performance increase, then no, RAID 1 is not worth the cost and effort. If you want uptime and redundancy (RAID 1 != backup BTW), then RAID 1 might be worth the cost and effort.
 
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