RAID really worth it?

D

DryFire

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 19, 2003
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What kind of preformance gains from one sata drive to two of them in a raid 0 or 1 array?

I can either go with two 80gb maxtors in a riad array or 1 gb of ram for my prospective A64 system. Thing is upgrading ram would be much easier then a whole new install of windows and other apps.

I have always though that the cost of raid was not really worth it.

The above Part aside is RAID worth it?
 
RAID 0 has some performance gains - 5-15% depending on CPU, drive speed and some other stuff. If you're talking about Raptors, they are the fastest available without scsi. The HD is also a PC's biggest bottleneck so every little bit helps. Has no redundancy - 1 drive goes bye bye and so does your data.

RAID 1 will have little to no performance increase, but will have redundancy. If one drive fails, all you data still exists on the other.

RAID 5 and up is very worth it in servers. Its usually SCSI which drives the costs up, but worth every penny. It allows increased performance and redundancy in one (expensive) package.


So its it worth it - sortof :)
 
really depends on use


always RAM first for any intensive application
(Im running 4GB)
 
5-15%is definatly not worht the extra $80. Even if i could afford it and my ram.

whish i could afford scsi or a raptor. Maybe I'll find that extra $80 soon.

Was definatly gonna use raid 0 as i have an external drive for important files.
 
For the most part, Raid 0 is a tweaker's solution. ZERO fault tolerance. Like Party2Go said, ya loose 1 drive and you've lost it ALL. Not a GREAT deal of performance increase with just 2 drives, but much more is possible w/ more drives. Most SATA raid cards on motherboards only support 2 drives, limiting your options again...

And like the Czar said, RAM is your friend!!! :D

Unless you're manipulating HUGE multi-gig photoshop files or something, You'd be better served with the 1gb of ram.
 
When my system has more power then i could possibly use I would go insane because there would be no upgrade.
 
well I exaggerated a bit, on the processor side there is always folding and animation rendering
(the later is what my rig is for)

but its nearly impossible to saturate a 64bit PCI bus without a multi-user environment
most individual aps just dont write or read that much data
(64bit \ 66MHz = 532MB/s) and thats not even PCI-X
 
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