Raid question

[tsonka]

I read through the "answers" sticky but most of that seemed to be relating to data protection which I am not interested in, I am looking for a preformance increase and I "think" raid would help. Im not sure though . Im not having really having any problems, Im wanting to accomplish 2 things.

1. I am wanting to increasy my HDD capasity

2. I play games like EQ, BF2142 and am looking forward to Vanguard. Im wanting to have the fastest load times possible (while staying within what is affordable to me)

I currently have:

AMD 3500+ processor (not overclocked)
Asus A8N-SLI Delux Mobo
2gig Corsair memory
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

I was looking on Newegg and can get another HDD like what I have for $67 and that is affordable to me.

Is there a raid configuration that will:

1. Increase my HDD capasity to 500gig

and

2. Not necessairly cut my HDD time in half but give me atleast a 30% increase in preformance





Or would I be better off just buying a single larger faster HDD? If so Id love to see a link to suggested drives under $100.

 

[djnes]

I'd keep the drive you have and get a second one for an external USB cage. 250 GB is a lot of space to be using all the time. RAID isn't going to give you the improvements you want...if it gives you any improvement at all. You may load levels a tiny bit faster (in some cases), but that's about it.

 

[delemorte]

agreed. you could double your drvie capacity but 30% is very abitious. I noticed substatially faster load times by uping to 4 gigs of ram from 2 gigs. You could always shoot for a raid 5 but you would need 3 more drives instead of 1. However you would still have marginal increases in load time.

 

[Seated]

RAID is great for protection as well as increased sequential read/write ability on large files. For what you are wanting, get yourself a WD Raptor, 74 or 150gig drive. To increase the load times, you'll want faster drive access speed. Also, as the one poster mentioned, more RAM the better, though you have 2 gig (as I recall) which is enough.

 

[este]

RAID is great for protection as well as increased sequential read/write ability on large files.

Uh, noobie, the raid type that is good for data protection (raid1) is not any better for seq reads then a single drive.

To OP: Since I have no idea if you have important files or plan on backing up data now and then I can not recommend RAID0 (adding another drive in stripping mode) right off the bat.

If you had an Intel Matrix raid controller I could but that just eliminated the chance of loosing data on a raid0 (You can make a smaller raid1 (mirrored) volume and still only use those 2 drives)

However, I use raid0 (and raid1) and the performance is freaking insane. I paid $184 for 2x320GB drives and I am constantly the first person to load in BF2. Burst speed of 410MB/s and seq read of 140MB/s. I LOVE it, but I have automated backups to my mirrored partition.

Don't know if that helps, if you don't plan on raiding then yes get another 320GB or a smaller raptor.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Uh, noobie, the raid type that is good for data protection (raid1) is not any better for seq reads then a single drive.

It is if you're doing more than one sequential read from different parts of the drive.

OP: The 2500KS is a good deal faster than the 2500JS, so as long as you're buying a new disk, buy a *new* one. I wouldn't recommend doing raid 0 if you have important data. Striping two dissimilar disks can be problematic, and even if you got a JS you'd still almost certainly have two different revisions.

 

[este]

It is if you're doing more than one sequential read from different parts of the drive.

How is that? I thought the heads were synchronized in either raid mode? Either way, I doubt thats what guy above meant,

OP: The 2500KS is a good deal faster than the 2500JS, so as long as you're buying a new disk, buy a *new* one. I wouldn't recommend doing raid 0 if you have important data. Striping two dissimilar disks can be problematic, and even if you got a JS you'd still almost certainly have two different revisions.

True.

 

[UICompE02]

How is that? I thought the heads were synchronized in either raid mode? Either way, I doubt thats what guy above meant

Actually, that's almost never true. The individual hard drives in an array are completely independent as far as they are aware, so there's no synchronization between the actual heads in the drive.

The way it works is that the RAID controller typically receives a request from the OS to read or write a certain chunk of data. Then the RAID controller splits this up this read based on which parts of the data are stored on which disk and sends independent read or write commands to each hard drive it needs to get data from or send it to.

An intelligent RAID 1 implementation, while not speeding up sequential write operations due to the fact that it has to write all data to all disks within in it, will typically read chunks of data from each disk (similar to how RAID0 works for a read) since it has two or more copies of every piece of data to work with.

For example, let's say you have a RAID 1 volume with two drives and 64KB stripes. If you write a 128KB chunk of data to the volume, the controller will send identical 128KB write requests to both drives in the array. When it comes time to read that chunk back, the RAID controller will send a read request to one drive for the first 64KB of the data and a separate request to the second drive for teh secon 64KB of the data. If everything is set up right, and all the data accesses are aligned in a certain way, etc., RAID 1 can increase the sequential read spead compared to a single disk.