RAID0 vs Single Drive

[polonyc2]

I never had a RAID array before and was considering getting one for my next build...I always assumed RAID0 offered the best performance vs a single drive but after doing a lot of reading on the subject it seems that it is not necessarily the case...although there are quite a few people who swear that RAID0 is definitely the way to go it seems as though more people feel the opposite

anyone have any opinions on this issue

I mostly use my system for high end gaming and apparently RAID0 does little or nothing to improve performance in this area...it seems like getting a RAID0 would only cause potential issues: failure rates on each drive goes up, a data backup nightmare, and increases in noise, thermals, and power consumption...so I guess my main question is, is a RAID0 setup worth it?

here are some of the better articles I read on the subject from some sites I trust...

StorageReview.com - Tiki : SingleDriveVsRaid0

AnandTech: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000: Two Terabyte RAID Redux

 

[Archer75]

RAID 0 excels in synthetic benchmarks, or writing large files to disk.

However in real world benchmarks when reading alot of smaller files(which is what you do most of the time) it is no faster than a single drive. Often times slower.

IMO it's not worth it.

 

[DonDon]

While I am going with a 2 drive raid 0 setup on my new system, it was just for convenience, not for utmost performance. With the 2 320 gig drives in raid 0, I can then make my final partitions any size I want with out any hassles of trying to fit a particular partition on a particular drive. I am going to make 1 100 gig partition for Vista, 1 100 gig partition for XP, and the rest as a large local storage partition. I am not concerned about data security as anything important gets stored on my 500 GIG raid 1 NAS that gets backed up every couple of weeks.

If I was you, I would go with a 150 Gig Raptor. You loose some space, but get a really fast drive.

Don

\edit\ As far as failure rates on the drives, raid 0 does not raise the failure rate of the drives, it's just that the more drives you have in the array, the higher the failure rate of the ARRAY. For instance, if your drive has a Mean Time Between Failures mtbf of 100,000 hours, putting 2 of these drives in a Raid 0 would give the Raid array a MTBF of 50,000 hours. 4 drives would give you a mtbf of 25,000 hours.

 

[Ockie]

There really needs to be a comprehensive sticky addressing the raid 0 questions.

 

[drizzt81]

so I guess my main question is, is a RAID0 setup worth it?

Depends a lot on how much money you make and your utility function for hard drive STR.

There really needs to be a comprehensive sticky addressing the raid 0 questions.

That would be nice, though I would doubt anyone would read it, considering we still get the `my hdd is missing space' question about twice a month.

 

[Rogue71]

I never had a RAID array before and was considering getting one for my next build...I always assumed RAID0 offered the best performance vs a single drive but after doing a lot of reading on the subject it seems that it is not necessarily the case...although there are quite a few people who swear that RAID0 is definitely the way to go it seems as though more people feel the opposite

anyone have any opinions on this issue

I mostly use my system for high end gaming and apparently RAID0 does little or nothing to improve performance in this area...it seems like getting a RAID0 would only cause potential issues: failure rates on each drive goes up, a data backup nightmare, and increases in noise, thermals, and power consumption...so I guess my main question is, is a RAID0 setup worth it?

here are some of the better articles I read on the subject from some sites I trust...



StorageReview.com - Tiki : SingleDriveVsRaid0

AnandTech: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000: Two Terabyte RAID Redux

i did the same research on raid 0 as i wanted to see if a 150gb raptor was the way to go to improve my gaming rig. it turns out that a lone raptor will perform better than 2 sata 7200 rpm drives in raid 0. and raiding raptors doesnt give enough of a boost to warant the potential for raid failure.

** the biggest problem with raid is most people dont understand 1 thing. onboard raid controllers are software based, not hardware. if you wanna pay alot of money for a hardware raid controller then yes, raid away. but onboard raid solutions in my book just arent worth the potential hastle of failure.

 

[DonDon]

** the biggest problem with raid is most people dont understand 1 thing. onboard raid controllers are software based, not hardware. if you wanna pay alot of money for a hardware raid controller then yes, raid away. but onboard raid solutions in my book just arent worth the potential hastle of failure.

I would like to respectfully disagree with you, although we may be just having a missunderstanding of terms here.

My understanding of a software based RAID was if you set up a striped array in windows. This is completely in software with no hardware involved in the setting up and controlling the RAID.

The Raid setup on motherboards is typically a separate controller chip which builds and controls the RAID, and then presents the Bios with the single "hard drive" the raid controller chip has built and controls. This is all done long before the OS has even begun to boot. My definition of a hardware controlled RAID.

You can take the same controller chip, slap it on an add in card, and you have the same situation. It's just that the chip mounted on the motherboard is hard wired to the southbridge chip instead of interfaced through one of the external busses.

Now, there are varying quality of hardware based raids, with some of the server systems being higher quality and more resilient, and expensive. The ones built into motherboards are the low end, but still hardware based.

Don

 

[matrix563]

i'm loving raid 0 on my laptop. i have just under 298gb formatted space

i extracted a cd iso and it was done before i finished blinking. not that fast all the time but it is nice tohave raid 0 in 7200rpm drives on a lappy . i am so spoiled with the speed

 

[Archer75]

i'm loving raid 0 on my laptop. i have just under 298gb formatted space

i extracted a cd iso and it was done before i finished blinking. not that fast all the time but it is nice tohave raid 0 in 7200rpm drives on a lappy . i am so spoiled with the speed

Chances are your laptop came with the raid 0? So the speed increase is just the faster hardware in the laptop and not the raid 0 which in real world benchmarks has been shown to do nothing.

 

[Keiichi]

The problem with Raid0 is that if one drive fails they all fail.

 

[DonDon]

The problem with Raid0 is that if one drive fails they all fail.

Hard drives have always been, and will continue to be the highest fail item in a computer. Anything stored on a hard drive can disappear at any time for no reason at all.

Raid 0 has no redundancy. If one drive fails, the array fails, not the other drives. The other drives in the array are fine, but the data they had is gone. Replace the defective drive, reset the array, and reload your data from your backup.

You did have a backup, right?

If the drives in your array have a Mean Time Between Failure mtbf of 100000 hours, a 2 drive array will only have a mtbf of 50000 hours. A 4 drive array is even worse at 25000 hours.

You are simply trading some speed and convenience for a reduction of reliability. A fair trade for me as I have a decent backup plan for my data.

Don

 

[matrix563]

Chances are your laptop came with the raid 0? So the speed increase is just the faster hardware in the laptop and not the raid 0 which in real world benchmarks has been shown to do nothing.

nope it just came with 1 100gb 5400rpm drive

 

[Archer75]

nope it just came with 1 100gb 5400rpm drive

So if you had a 100gb 5400rpm drive and now have just under 300gb formatted space it would then seem you replaced the 100gb 5400rpm drive with two new drives? Perhaps two 7200rpm drives?

 

[RavenD]

If you want to do well on synthetic benchmarks, go with raid-0.
If you want real-world performance, go with a 150GB Raptor.

Raid-0 increases sequential transfer times, but hurts latency.

 

[matrix563]

So if you had a 100gb 5400rpm drive and now have just under 300gb formatted space it would then seem you replaced the 100gb 5400rpm drive with two new drives? Perhaps two 7200rpm drives?

did u read my whole post? yes it was 2 7200rpm 2.5 inch laptop drives

 

[Archer75]

did u read my whole post? yes it was 2 7200rpm 2.5 inch laptop drives

It just goes to show your performance gains have nothing to do with Raid 0 but rather the fact that you went to a 7200rpm drive.

 

[matrix563]

It just goes to show your performance gains have nothing to do with Raid 0 but rather the fact that you went to a 7200rpm drive.

lol i know that .

if i had 1 7200rpm drive i probably wouldn't have been as inclined to buy a second one

 

[svak]

I was just about to ask the same question. I'd like to get 500gb of space, but wasn't sure if I should go for 2x250 in a RAID or 1x500 on it's own. I don't do a whole lot of gaming, but I have a diverse amount of things to store. I'd like to have one partition for XP, one for Vista, one for Linux (I want to try Ubuntu ), one for videos, and one for music and other media. So, for five partitions, I wasn't sure if my best bet would be to RAID or not.

I've heard that placing the OS on the outermost portion of the drive improves performance, but since I've been considering three OSes, I didn't know how that would affect speeds, and had an idea that RAID0 might balance things out a bit.

 

[DonDon]

I was just about to ask the same question. I'd like to get 500gb of space, but wasn't sure if I should go for 2x250 in a RAID or 1x500 on it's own. I don't do a whole lot of gaming, but I have a diverse amount of things to store. I'd like to have one partition for XP, one for Vista, one for Linux (I want to try Ubuntu ), one for videos, and one for music and other media. So, for five partitions, I wasn't sure if my best bet would be to RAID or not.

Raid 0 offers a modest increase in performance in some situations. It comes at a cost of more complexity and an increased chance of array failure.

Unless you are a benchmark junky, get the single large drive. If you are like me and like things overly complicated and a little faster, go with the Raid.

I've heard that placing the OS on the outermost portion of the drive improves performance, but since I've been considering three OSes, I didn't know how that would affect speeds, and had an idea that RAID0 might balance things out a bit

While it is true that the drive reads from the outer tracks a little faster, it is not something you will notice in day to day use. So, put the OS you will use the most in the first partition, so on down the line till you get to the last partition which will be your your data partition.

Raid-0 increases sequential transfer times, but hurts latency.

Every benchmark I've seen shows no loss of latency when you go to a Raid0 setup with the same model of drive. It does not get any better though. It is typically exactly the same. It is possible for a crappy controller to cause problems like poor latency, but that is not a general characteristic of Raid0.

Oh yea, make sure you have a backup of all that data on your drive.

Don

 

[xX_Jack_Carver_Xx]

Ive been running Raid0 since 2002, at first it was 2 80G maxtor 7200rpm drives, in 2004 I moved to 2 36G raptors that have been running strong ever since. Ive never had a "raid" failure, guess these raptors are just bulletproof.

Ive been on Nvidia boards all along, so the controller design has 2 seperate sata controllers built into the main chip... NF4/570/590. Im using 590SLI lately and the pep from having raid0, set up across seperate disk controllers allows simultaneous access of both drives, each with fast raptor random access and strong sustained transfer rate. I also have the pagefile on a seperate IDE drive (4G invisible partition at the outermost edge of the drive) so the pagefile uses a 3rd seperate controller so paging doesn't combat other drive accesses when it needs to happen simultaneously. Makes for a sophisticated system design that gets the most out of the hardware.

Needless to say I'm quite satisfied. Also, one 36G would be too small for an XPpro install, but two is just right.

The next choice would be two new 7200.11 drives, either 500G or 1TB, in raid0 with a 80G partition (40+40) so the OS uses the very outer most edge of the drive, combined with dual sataII controllers you get fantastic throughput...200+MB/s transfer rates.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I was just about to ask the same question. I'd like to get 500gb of space, but wasn't sure if I should go for 2x250 in a RAID or 1x500 on it's own.

I'd buy the single large drive. It'll be a higher density design, a better buffer strategy, and probably cheaper too.

 

[svak]

I'd buy the single large drive. It'll be a higher density design, a better buffer strategy, and probably cheaper too.

Yeah, it's cheaper by a good $90 or so. I guess I'll get the 500gb now. Any recommendations? I'd like a WD, they've always served me well. What's the difference between the SE16 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073) and the RE2 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136205), besides $30?

Maybe in a few more years I'll get a Raptor for my OS, or maybe even a SSD if they've gone down in price enough, then keep the 500gb as bulk storage.

Edit: Random question, but can you set up SSDs in a RAID?

 

[unhappy_mage]

Yeah, it's cheaper by a good $90 or so. I guess I'll get the 500gb now. Any recommendations? I'd like a WD, they've always served me well. What's the difference between the SE16 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073) and the RE2 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136205), besides $30?

TLER. Look it up for more information, but the long and the short of it is there's less rigorous error checking on the RE drives and they're not suitable for single-disk desktop use.

Edit: Random question, but can you set up SSDs in a RAID?

Sure. RAID is media-agnostic. I've seen RAID arrays of floppy drives and USB thumbdrives.

 

[c3141hf]

Generally speaking, the onboard RAID solutions on motherboards are software based. They use BIOS tricks so that the operating system sees the RAID Array as a single drive but the actual computational workload is very much done on the CPU.

This also goes for the cheap $20 "RAID Controllers" that you might find. They are merely an HDD Controller and a BIOS on a card, they rely on the CPU to do the striping or mirroring through special drivers.

In contrast, true RAID controllers have their own microprocessor which does the work needed to stripe or mirror data.

Pretty much anything under $100 advertised as a RAID Controller is really going to be using fakeraid and software tricks.

You can read more about the difference here and here.