Raid0 question

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Gabe3

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I have never raided(well in WoW I did.....ok bad joke)

Right now I'm running a maxtor 160gb 7200rpm sata 1.5 as my OS drive and using about a 7 year old samsung 80gb 5400rpm IDE drive as a backup drive to store all my important stuff(iam dangerous like that)

Ok so about 2 months ago my 80gb IDE went haywire for an hour, windows stopped booting. I had to unplug the IDE drive to get it to boot, I then shut down the PC and plugged it back in and its been working since. So I want get rid of the crappy 80 gigger because its life is going to end soon, 7 years already seems long.

I've always wanted to raid so I'm thinking of buying 2 of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136075

or maybe seagate would be a better brand to get?

My question is would like a 10k RPM raptor be faster then 2 of the above drives in raid0. Maybe I'm confused but two 7200rpm drives would be 14400 RPM, correct? therefor faster then a 10k raptor. right?
 
You can't add the RPM figures together, it doesn't really make sense. RPM is a measure of how fast the platters spin. Putting together two drives won't make them spin faster, or act like a disk with a faster rotational speed either; in fact, RAID0 may slow down seek times rather than speeding them up. If you're after fast seek times, then a single drive of higher RPM is better. RAID0 will however increase your theoretical maximum transfer rate (although this would only be achieved if there were simultaneous read requests going on that can be served from different disks, which is not a common situation on a single-user machine).
 
I was under the impression that with two 160gb raid0 drives I would have 160gb total space but I'm told that I will have 320gb total with raid0.
 
I've done A LOT of research on raid0 performance in gaming over the past few years but I keep fighting myself from buying it because it doesn't provide much bonus for gaming.

It sounds cool and is fun to set up that kinda stuff but in real life it doesn't really provide that much more over a Raptor or one of the new WD 320platter drives or seagate .11 drives.

Raid0 is like quad cores, very, very slight performance increase in gaming (no where near the cost/performance ratio that is acceptable), but if you do a lot of video editing or are a professional working with studio level software, it's absolutely worth the huge performance boost.

raid0 in gaming = 'tweaking' the page file

.... if you get what I mean.

Of course everyone here will disagree with me because geeks love hardware and more hardware = better and more fun!
 
Raid 0 will double (in theory, depends on the hardware) read and write throughput, but does not help the seek time. 2 drives in a Raid 0 will double the chance of the Raid array failing because if either drive dies, your data is gone. It also slows your boot as you add the extra time for the array bios to initialize into your boot time.

In real life, you will see a modest performance increase.

Doesn't seem worth it to me. Given the choice, I went with a 500 gig 7200.11 last month for my new system.

Don
 
But its so cool to do new things.. I just had to do it with my two new Wd 640gbs.. hehe
 
Hey, if you want to do it, go for it. Just remember that there are some pitfalls. Plan for them, and you will not have too many problems.

Look, any drive can fail, at any time, and with no warning.

Raid 0 gives you a modest performance increase, but you have to buy 2 or more drives and boost your chance of failure.

A Western Digital Raptor 10K drive gives you a good access time boost, but at a steep cost and capacity hit.

The current High density drives like the samsung F1 and the Seagate 7200.11 drives give you high capacity with good speed at a decent price.

I am a value conscience user. If cost was no object, I would be running a 4 X Raptor on a PCI Express controller. But cost is an object for me, so I went with a single 500 gig 7200.11.

If you want to play with a Raid setup, go for it. Hey, maybe you could pick up a drive to use during business hours, and a couple more drives to use during after hours to see if the speed increase is worth it to run with a Raid setup.

The willingness to experiment is what separates the geek from the wanna be geek.

Do you wanna be a real geek?

Don
 
haha. Nice speech Don. I use my computer for more then gaming, but lately its been mostly gaming. I take a big performance hit when I record video with fraps, so I never do it....If I did raid0 I wonder if that would change.
 
Well, in my experience, working with video is usually CPU bound as far as performance goes, not drive bound.

I am not sure what recording video with fraps means, but here is what I found in real life the last couple of months.

My single 500 gig 7200.11 can move around 80 MB/Sec. There is no video that consumes more than 80 mb/sec that I know of.

I have converted video files for use on my Zune on local drives and via network shares and found little difference in performance. My Q6600 can convert video as fast as my Hammer Myshare or a local drive can deliver data.

Give it a try, it can't hurt.

Don
 
Gabe3 said:
I was under the impression that with two 160gb raid0 drives I would have 160gb total space but I'm told that I will have 320gb total with raid0.
Click to expand...

You were probably thinking of RAID1, where each drive mirrors the others - RAID0 involves striping the data over 2+ drives. RAID1 would increase reliability because if one drive fails then the other drive has all the data - although it's not a backup method. But it doesn't do much for performance, and obviously you've just paid twice for the same capacity, which makes it an unpopular option for enthusiasts.
 
I have two wd1600aajs drives that I used in a RAID-0 array. The write/read speed was more than double what a single drive could muster. Ironically the access time was much lower than a single drive as well, 13.5ms versus 20.1ms using HDTune. Im still trying to figure out why because TomsHardware.com recorded 13.1ms in their benchmark.

Keep in mind that hard drive S.M.A.R.T. abilities dont work in RAID and neither does memtest.
 
Oh? What does memtest have to do with it? I thought read and access time were the same thing.
 
The memtest cd wouldnt boot and I read someone found it was because of raid. I disabled raid and memtest booted but then my raid volume wouldnt boot so I had to reinstall windows. Didn't do raid this time. Instead I put games on one drive and os on the other.
 
Those are typical Raid0 benchmarks. Double the read/write speed, but no improvement on the access time.

Remember, that is comparing to a 36 Gig Raptor. They are the slowest version.

Don
 
Well I ordered the two western digital 7200rpm drives, cost $107 total from newgg. I understand that I can put the raid drivers on thumb drive, floppy, or cd rom for vista. I unzipped the 3 folders from nvidia's nforce 15.01 driver.

sataraid

sata_ide

raidtool

from what I understand is during the vista install screen I select load driver. The question is which driver package do I load? sataraid or sata_ide. I'm told I don't need the raidtool. Do I load sata_ide first then sataraid or what?
 
bump? either this is a stupid question or no one knows the answer.
 
Don, after much thought. I'm going RAID 5 with minimum 3 drives to start off then I will add in a 4th in a few weeks. I purchased me a more Quality controller card too from http://www.areca.us/products/pcie.htm
Areca Technology Corporation

It scared me to think what might happen using my on board nvidia RAID with 0. Cant wait to start setting it up when the parts all come in later today. Any advice before i get started?
 
Cool.

Good move going with the Areca controller.

Just remember that any Raid is not a replacement of a good backup plan. I keep a couple of extra copies of my music and Photos.

Let us know how things go.

Don
 
Gabe3 said:
can anyone else confirm I only install the sataraid driver?
Click to expand...

Have you ever thought about reading the documentation that comes with your products for installation and configuration? In other words.. RTFM... You will find your answers if you start reading. How will you ever learn anything if you don't figure it out, or read about the product info? Even a google search is always recommended.

You have an NVIDIA based mother board. You want a RAID array. Now what's the controller? . . . It's actually common sense if you just think about what's controlling your devices, and will it need drivers.

This might help: http://us.dfi.com.tw/Support/Downlo....jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3471&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP&SITE=US
 
Sniper|3d-R| said:
Have you ever thought about reading the documentation that comes with your products for installation and configuration? In other words.. RTFM... You will find your answers if you start reading. How will you ever learn anything if you don't figure it out, or read about the product info? Even a google search is always recommended.

You have an NVIDIA based mother board. You want a RAID array. Now what's the controller? . . . It's actually common sense if you just think about what's controlling your devices, and will it need drivers.

This might help: http://us.dfi.com.tw/Support/Downlo....jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3471&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP&SITE=US
Click to expand...

I thought about that but I like getting advice from people who have actually done it. I did several google searches but couldn't find what I was looking for.
 
You really don't need to "install a driver" per say. During the Windows install (for XP, I'm not sure about Vista) when it says hit F6 if you need to install 3rd party drivers to access your drives, it will then ask you to insert a diskette with the drivers. It will then list the devices, and you simply select the device you are installing.

If you are adding the controller to an existing install, the Add New Hardware wizard will let you point to where the drivers are, and it should install the appropriate driver.

If your controller comes with an install CD or disk, you are all set.

Don
 
DonDon said:
You really don't need to "install a driver" per say. During the Windows install (for XP, I'm not sure about Vista) when it says hit F6 if you need to install 3rd party drivers to access your drives, it will then ask you to insert a diskette with the drivers. It will then list the devices, and you simply select the device you are installing.

If you are adding the controller to an existing install, the Add New Hardware wizard will let you point to where the drivers are, and it should install the appropriate driver.

If your controller comes with an install CD or disk, you are all set.

Don
Click to expand...

I'm using the nforce 4 controller on my motherboard.
 
I got the drives in raid0. However Iam getting file errors when I run some programs. I think its possible that I was not suppose to install the nvidia 15.01 chipset drivers. Does anyone know if iam suppose to install those chipset drivers?
 
As odd as this may sound, I've never run a benchie on a single Raptor... just Raptors in RAID.

Here's a benchie I ran earlier this evening with my 4 raptors... If you can find someone with a single raptor, you can compare those to my results below.

raptors_new.jpg
 
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