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RAID Question. Should I do it or not?

N

NightyNight

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 27, 2004
Messages
88
I just purchased a new system. So far my setup is:

AMD 64bit 3500+ with HyperTransport
MSI K8 Neo2 Mobo
1 gig of Dual Channel Corsair TwinX Ram XMS
2 60GB Maxtor 7200RPM "DiamondMax"
Sony 16x DVD-R/RW
Sony 16x DVD-ROM
XFX nVidia 6600GT
Raidmax Scorpio Case with 420W power supply

My question is whether or not to set up my two hard drives to Raid level 0 for better performance. Will I see a noticeable difference when I work/play rather than 1 Hard Drive or not?
Thanks
 
It really depends on what you do. If you work with very large files or something then you will beefit from a RAID 0 array. Otherwise you won't. I say go for it since you already have both drives. The only drawback si that if one drive dies then you lose everything. This is not much of a problems for many people including me.
 
Well,

I play games mostly and surf the web, chat with friends. Same as what most teens do. The games I play are Counter-Strike 1.6, CS:S, and soon DOD:S. I also do small projects with PS, and Macromedia Studio programs.

Also, I'm going into this with barely any knowledge on how to set it up. I've read a setup thing on the web, but thats the extent. I still have a few unanswered questions on it, mainly, all I want to know is if I'll see a difference in games.
 
RAID 0 will give you bragging rights, but very little if any performance gain in gaming. There's been more than a few reviews on that subject. Also, it's one more thing that can go wrong and f-up your data.
 
Santa brought me two 200GB SATA seagate 7200.7's ... I raided them.

Results:
IDE drive max read/write rate: 43mb/s
RAID-0 SATA drive max read/write rate: 124mb/s

That's about 3x faster than standard IDE. I installed a seperate copy of windows on the RAID array, and without many drivers and basically a clean OS, it boots up in about 25 seconds, about 10 of which are the actual XP loading seconds. The other is bios-based posting, etc.

Also, practical world test: I render a 3dsMax animation to a .mov file, 380mb. When I play it off the IDE drive, the first time it stutters quite heavily as it tries to load each frame. Second time, it's already in memory and plays smothly.
When I play it off the RAID array, it does not stutter on the first time, even immediately after reboot.

It will help with load times. It's free performance, just do it.
About reliability... I know seagate has a 5-year warranty on their drives. Maxtors, i've had bad luck with. But it's fairly unlikely to have them fail if you don't do anything stupid to your OS, and are weary of viruses, etc..

One thing.. on my KV8-pro, it is very easy to enter the RAID rom and press about two buttons which would disband the RAID-0 config and permanently erase everything within a second.

On installing windows onto a fresh RAID array, off a cd, just do this:
As soon as you boot off your CD, it asks you to press F6 if you have any RAID drivers to install. Do so. Then insert the floppy disk with the RAID drivers that came with the mobo. When it comes time to run the drivers in the winsetup, it will ask you to press "S" and select the driver. NOTE!: The winsetup can only show a selection of 4 drivers on screen, so if you have more than 4 drivers on the floppy, you will not see all of them at once. There is no indicator of a scroll, but if your corresponding driver isnt showing on the screen, push "DOWN" at the last driver to scroll and choose more. It took me 3 hours to realize that.
 
As I see it, with drives this big nowadays, Raid0 is little performance gain and double the risk of data loss. Now, Raid1 or Raid0+1, then you got something. But Raid0....nah.
 
Double risk, yes... but the single risk of HD failure in the first place is very small, esp. with seagate. Consider the many things that could go wrong before an HD dies.

ANd what do you mean "drives this big"... drive size has almost no effect on performance. If you mean risk of more data being lost... well, I've yet to fill 2 gigs out of 400.
 
With drives "this big" i meant that there are only 2 reasons for Raid0:

1. To make 2 smaller drives become one big one

2. To have striping over 2 harddrives to gain performance

Since drives are so big now, the first reason is kind of absolete (like you said, you haven't filled one yet) and the second reason is imho not enough to justify a Raid0 setup alone.

Just my opinion. I rather have one Raptor at 10000rpm than 2 any Sata drives in Raid0.
 
just know that the drive manufacturer will NOT replace the data you loose if your RAID-0 array goes titsup.

also, nobody said that there were not application which would benefit from RAID-0, but often times it is possible to get more benefits from using the two drives seperately and putting data on them in a manner so that having two spindles will provide a benefit.
 
omg if a drive dies you lose everything

if you run 1 drive and it fails you lose everything :rolleyes:

do it, brag about it, smoke your friends computer at LANs when your in a rush to load up a game.
 
Backing up your games iso files than mounting them with dameon tools or alcohol 120% will also speed up the load times a bit.
 
Well, I said it's a brand new drive so I have yet to fill it.

And RAID-0 does benifit some practical applications.
e.g. I do 3d design, and sometimes, after 20 hours of rendering, I come out with a video that's about two minutes long and weighs a gig or more. Now, it comes out in .mov movie format, which is uncompressed, full quality frames. As I mentioned, when compiling and writing these things to disk, RAID-0 truly speeds things up.

And of course, I load all the levels faster on my games now!
 
krizzle said:
Well, I said it's a brand new drive so I have yet to fill it.

And RAID-0 does benifit some practical applications.
e.g. I do 3d design, and sometimes, after 20 hours of rendering, I come out with a video that's about two minutes long and weighs a gig or more. Now, it comes out in .mov movie format, which is uncompressed, full quality frames. As I mentioned, when compiling and writing these things to disk, RAID-0 truly speeds things up.

And of course, I load all the levels faster on my games now!
Click to expand...

That is interesting real-world feedback, esp the lack of stuttering. Do you also run a RAID 1 (or some other mirroring or backup) for your design work? I toyed with the idea of trying RAID 0 until I accidently touched my Seagate HDD with the back of the power toggle for a cathode light tube. The resulting spark instantly shut down my entire system. Luckily no damage, but I went RAID 1 the next day.
 
with only 60gb's to deal with, id definetly do raid 0 to get the extra space and performance. either that or just use them both seperatly non-raid.
 
c1001 said:
That is interesting real-world feedback, esp the lack of stuttering. Do you also run a RAID 1 (or some other mirroring or backup) for your design work? I toyed with the idea of trying RAID 0 until I accidently touched my Seagate HDD with the back of the power toggle for a cathode light tube. The resulting spark instantly shut down my entire system. Luckily no damage, but I went RAID 1 the next day.
Click to expand...
No, no RAID-1 as of now. Just got this RAID-0 setup for Xmas... and my design work is not very vital. Just messing around, mostly... Produced one scene, which I have many copies of.

Back on topic:
I say, if you're not holding information with value, e.g. governmental nuke-launch algorithms... Just RAID-0. Free performance.
 
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