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Stiletto One
2[H]4U
- Joined
- May 7, 2002
- Messages
- 3,906
So. There have been ALOT of threads lately with newcomers asking for suggestions on their spec lists (pre-purchase, thankfully), which have included the likes of ThermalTake cooling gear and RAID0 arrays.
On ThermalTake cooling gear: I'm not going to bother defending myself, just don't buy it. Their power supplies aren't TOO bad, but I'll just say to get a Fortron or Antec or Enermax.
Now for RAID0: I'm seeing people who just don't know anything about it except for "makes drives into one big fast drive".
1.) Yes, this is true. RAID0 is called "striping" and splits data across every drive in the array. Theoretically, this doubles read and write speeds, because the RAID controller can split data traffic over the two drives. One drive can handle X amount of data per second; two drives can handle 2X amount of data per second, and so on. So that's what RAID0 does, and why it exists.
2.) Theory != practice. The kind of RAID controller that ships strapped onto consumer-level motherboards and controller cards are "host based". This has the same meaning as with printers: the host CPU does pretty much all of the processing work. So a RAID controller can easily suck up over 20% of your CPU resources when there's heavy hard drive traffic. If you're doing a home file/web server, this might be OK; in gaming, it's bad for you.
2.b) You will almost never get anywhere near full theoretical speed; the increase in access latency (the time it takes for your storage system to retrieve whatever file you're requesting) will offset any perceived speedup from increasing raw bandwidth. The car analogy works very well for this: would you rather have a car with a top speed of 200mph and a 0-60 of 12s, or one with top speed of 140 and a 0-60 of 8s?
3.) Probably the worst for those of us with no money, data redundancy. Comma. Lack of. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"RAID0 is redundant. Hence, the zero moniker: RAID0 isn't actually RAID. (Zero times X does not give a multiple of X, it gives zero. Algebra, foo'.) This means that if any one drive goes sour, then you lose EVERYTHING. No data recovery, no "fdisk /mbr", just GONE. Take everything I just wrote, and drop out every other character. How readable is it? NOT VERY. And it only gets worse as you add drives.
My conclusion: if you want lots of storage on more than one, the smart way is to just use those drives and partition them up. For example, instead of having one huge 160GB volume striped over two 80GB drives, I would do this:
Drive 1: Three partitions
#1: C drive. 10GB, for Windows and swap file. Nothing else.
#2: D drive. 30GB for program files. Literally, put Program Files there. Go to regedit, and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION and set the ProgramFilesDir directory to whatever you want to call it.
#3: E drive. 40GB for infrequently used files which you want to hold onto, like patches and installers. I guess music is OK, since the files aren't huge and can be quickly loaded into RAM.
Drive 2: One partition
#1: F drive. 80GB. Done. I would put My Documents on F drive (right-click on My Documents on the desktop, and it lets you map it), and just work from there.
This will still be faster than just one huge 160GB drive, on account of separating data accesses from everything else. And if anything corrupts a partition (most likely to be your OS partition), your data is still intact and all of the patches, drivers, and major service packs are already there (on E drive) for you to quickly get yourself to a semblance of up-to-date-ness.
Backups, of course, are still the way to go for data security. Archive any data you want to hold onto once you've decided that you won't be working with it anymore, and then go ahead and delete it from hard disk. Most of us home users don't have any need for multi-locality of dataafter all, does it REALLY matter if you can't find that backup disk with your high school junior year English term paper, four years down the road?
OK, rant done. Breakfast time.
On ThermalTake cooling gear: I'm not going to bother defending myself, just don't buy it. Their power supplies aren't TOO bad, but I'll just say to get a Fortron or Antec or Enermax.
Now for RAID0: I'm seeing people who just don't know anything about it except for "makes drives into one big fast drive".
1.) Yes, this is true. RAID0 is called "striping" and splits data across every drive in the array. Theoretically, this doubles read and write speeds, because the RAID controller can split data traffic over the two drives. One drive can handle X amount of data per second; two drives can handle 2X amount of data per second, and so on. So that's what RAID0 does, and why it exists.
2.) Theory != practice. The kind of RAID controller that ships strapped onto consumer-level motherboards and controller cards are "host based". This has the same meaning as with printers: the host CPU does pretty much all of the processing work. So a RAID controller can easily suck up over 20% of your CPU resources when there's heavy hard drive traffic. If you're doing a home file/web server, this might be OK; in gaming, it's bad for you.
2.b) You will almost never get anywhere near full theoretical speed; the increase in access latency (the time it takes for your storage system to retrieve whatever file you're requesting) will offset any perceived speedup from increasing raw bandwidth. The car analogy works very well for this: would you rather have a car with a top speed of 200mph and a 0-60 of 12s, or one with top speed of 140 and a 0-60 of 8s?
3.) Probably the worst for those of us with no money, data redundancy. Comma. Lack of. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"RAID0 is redundant. Hence, the zero moniker: RAID0 isn't actually RAID. (Zero times X does not give a multiple of X, it gives zero. Algebra, foo'.) This means that if any one drive goes sour, then you lose EVERYTHING. No data recovery, no "fdisk /mbr", just GONE. Take everything I just wrote, and drop out every other character. How readable is it? NOT VERY. And it only gets worse as you add drives.
My conclusion: if you want lots of storage on more than one, the smart way is to just use those drives and partition them up. For example, instead of having one huge 160GB volume striped over two 80GB drives, I would do this:
Drive 1: Three partitions
#1: C drive. 10GB, for Windows and swap file. Nothing else.
#2: D drive. 30GB for program files. Literally, put Program Files there. Go to regedit, and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION and set the ProgramFilesDir directory to whatever you want to call it.
#3: E drive. 40GB for infrequently used files which you want to hold onto, like patches and installers. I guess music is OK, since the files aren't huge and can be quickly loaded into RAM.
Drive 2: One partition
#1: F drive. 80GB. Done. I would put My Documents on F drive (right-click on My Documents on the desktop, and it lets you map it), and just work from there.
This will still be faster than just one huge 160GB drive, on account of separating data accesses from everything else. And if anything corrupts a partition (most likely to be your OS partition), your data is still intact and all of the patches, drivers, and major service packs are already there (on E drive) for you to quickly get yourself to a semblance of up-to-date-ness.
Backups, of course, are still the way to go for data security. Archive any data you want to hold onto once you've decided that you won't be working with it anymore, and then go ahead and delete it from hard disk. Most of us home users don't have any need for multi-locality of dataafter all, does it REALLY matter if you can't find that backup disk with your high school junior year English term paper, four years down the road?
OK, rant done. Breakfast time.