Raid questions

R

Riddleofsteel

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 4, 2007
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If I was to put 2x Samsung F3 1tb drives in RAID, would it be worth it to buy a controller card or just use my motherboard's built in controller? I have the 10R controller from Intel on board.

Also, in RAID, I'm guessing I could have two partitions but if I fill the rest of the drive does the speed plummet?

Last questions for this post, do games benefit from RAID or does it not matter? What do the other users here primarily do with RAID? Thanks.
 
Which RAID type? 1 or 0? For RAID 1 or RAID 0, the onboard controller will be enough. With either RAID types, the speed of the drive won't plummet dramatically if filled.
 
Games do load faster with a RAID 0 array. However it varies from game to game as to how fast exactly the game loads. Ranges from a few seconds to a full minute.
 
Hmm, so I guess I need to decide if load times are killing me or not. The biggest tradeoff is losing storage space with RAID potentially if I short-stroke.
 
So for raid 0, just use onboarch ICH10R raid. No need for a dedicated card until you start with 4+ drive Raid 5 and higher.

Speed wise, it will be faster. You will have 2x the chance of losing all of your data (since if either drive fails you lose everything).

Short stroke, probably isn't worth it. You may end up with something slightly faster. You won't notice the difference in all liklihood.

My advice would be to keep the disk space. Think of at least daily backups for raid 0.
 
you would not need a controller for raid 0, at least. i'm using 4 500gb platter drives and getting just over 500mb/s, so it's safe to say the throughput of the ich10r would be suitable for less of them.
 
I tried short stroked drives for about two days. It was faster, but not by enough that it outweighed the loss of capacity. Then again, with SSD's being widely available and seeing year/ year performance increases significantly higher than conventional drives, performance is really the realm of SSD's while large SATA drives are really going to be relegated to media storage for most users in the near future.
 
if you partition out the rest of the raid on the second raid volume, you wont lose the benefits of short stroking unless you are giving the OS reason to access the other volume. just leave your installed applications on the short stroked partition and things like media on the second volume, partitioned out.
 
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