Raptor Hds?

[djnes]

say and believe what you will, but i DID notice a difference from 1 drive to 2. If you wanna sit here and argue till we're both blue in the face thats fine. But i'm not going to tell you i didn't Notice a difference. If you wanna say i'm childish for trying to say i noticed a difference thats fine. But i will not sit here and say your right and i didn't notice a difference in the raid. I'm now done with this thread and your going on my ignore list as i don't need to listen to people tell me what i did and didn't experience.

I called you childish because you had to resort to childish sarcasm and little kiddie games, instead of discussing the topic with me. I'm glad your done with this thread...I was about to need a shovel to get through all the bull you were laying down.

 

[v3rt1g0]

The point was RAID0 is pretty much useless in a desktop environment. Most sites and magazines are finally agreeing with this. The problem is, a lot of you refuse to read the articles or the tests,

This is what's known as a paradigm shift. For a while, everyone ho was a "power-user", me included, thought RAID0 was the best thing available for desktop drives. Now, some very respected web and print organizations are doing some "real world" testing, and finding out it's not any faster, and in some cases is slower than a single drive of the same kind. That brings me to the second flaw with many fo the arguments here. There's a huge difference between synthetic benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. If you don't believe me, ask around in the video card forum...or ask Kyle to discuss Futuremark.

I used to be one that said "I know my Raptors in RAID0 are faster, because I can feel it. I can just tell". As a test, I broke up my array, and used just one of the Raptors. I did not notice any differences in speed. I used to clean Ghost images to quickly switch back and forth between RAID0 and a single drive. It's at that moment you realize how bullshit and ridiculous it was that you could say it "feels" faster. That's as un-scientific as it gets.

Now we can continue to go back and forth on this. But the fact remains. Some of you are arguing with fact. It's been proven, and beaten down. The fact that many of us long-time members are trying to encourage others to not use RAID is because we don't enjoy seeing a ton of threads with people asking how to recover data from a failed array. Me personally, I never stored and valuable data on my RAID0 anyway. If your going to have a wonderful backup solution, and your willing to buck the trend, install RAID0 and be happy. Just don't take the foolish route by telling people it's faster....it's not.

I don't refuse to read the articles, I refuse to agree with them.
You think just because they are published that they are absolute truth?

The Anandtech article used only TWO real world tests, both were games, and both *WERE TIMED BY HAND*. Yet you take the article as complete gospel as to why Raptors in RAID 0 are completely pointless? No Photoshop benchmarks? Video Editing? File copies? File Moves? System boot time? No HD tach throughput tests? Extracting files? Installing programs? Searching for files? Drive optimization?

Where's the beef?

You also say "There's a huge difference between synthetic benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. If you don't believe me, ask around in the video card forum...or ask Kyle to discuss Futuremark"
Yet you reference the Anandtech article which uses synthetic benchmarks almost exclusively.

None of us are arguing with fact, because what you post is not fact, it's opinion, synthetic benchmarks, and real world benchmarks that were timed by hand. You refer to articles that used a very narrow battery of tests which one cannot possibly draw a all encompassing conclusion from (but you have).

You make everyone using RAID 0 out to be forgotten hardcore user wannabes with their heads in the sand. Yet you adamantly profess that RAID 0 could be slower then a single drive. The same speed, yes, in some tests. Slower?... you actually believe that for a second?

 

[djnes]

You make everyone using RAID 0 out to be forgotten hardcore user wannabes with their heads in the sand. Yet you adamantly profess that RAID 0 could be slower then a single drive. heh. The same speed, yes, in some tests. Slower?... you actually believe that for a second?

Using a test you suggested, such as HDTach, I have tested the seek times of my Raptor RAID to have higher seek times than one single Raptor. Read more than just Anandtech's article. Read the ones at StorageReview. These are some of the most trusted and respected sites in the industry. I'm not ignorant to only believe what I read. But when I read something...and then repeat the tests and results myself, I believe it. That's called the Scientific Method. If it's repeatable, it's believable. Now...you want to keep arguing this too or just drop it?

 

[v3rt1g0]

Higher seek times of? 0.5ms? 1ms? You didn't mention the throughput, which generally more than makes up for a tiny bit higher seek time.

What motherboard are you using? Non PCI bottlenecked SATA?

Maybe you could point me to the StorageReview articles you mention. I looked through their articles but couldn't find anything about RAID with Raptors.

 

[djnes]

Maybe you could point me to the StorageReview articles you mention. I looked through their articles but couldn't find anything about RAID with Raptors.

It's RAID0 in general, not just with Raptors. Throughput only is a huge difference in the synthetic benchmarks. Various other people on here have posted results timing file transfers, load times of game levels (coming off the HDD and not CD), and other tests to show there is no difference. My seek times varied anywhere from .3 ms to 2.5 ms in my tests. Others have been able to find the same. My point is...once again...from the top...the very minimal speed gains (if any, which is the debatable part) do not in any way warrant your reduction by half of the MTBF. When you break the array and go back to a single drive, you loose nothing in overall performance.

Here's the link. If you read through, I think you'll see they pretty much say it doesn't offer you much at all. The pros are nothing compared to the cons.

http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0

 

[v3rt1g0]

...once again...from the top...

No need for the the belittling comment.

You mention a halving of the MTBF. Please provide proof of this.
I understand it halves the length of time your DATA will survive (as you have twice the chance of a SINGLE drive dying and taking ALL your data), but to half the life of EACH drive just because it's part of a RAID array? The different data access patterns wear it out? Doesn't make sense.

I agree you loose no _overall_ performance, but for high disk i/o operations like copying files, extracting files and the like, it's damn hard to believe that a single disk is just as fast. I'll test this for myself this weekend hopefully. Just need to make this week's backup before I break my array.

 

[v3rt1g0]

Throughput only is a huge difference in the synthetic benchmarks.

Why do you say that? I would think I'd be a huge difference for a medium-large file operations in windows explorer.

Also, you didn't answer:
What motherboard are you using? Non PCI bottlenecked SATA?

 

[djnes]

Why do you say that? I would think I'd be a huge difference for a medium-large file operations in windows explorer.

Also, you didn't answer:
What motherboard are you using? Non PCI bottlenecked SATA?

Yeah, I did forget that question. I tested on two separate boards..Abit IC7 and the Abit AI7. Both of which do not use PCI-bus SATA ports.

One of the games commonly tested was BF:1942. It was done rather well. A few people got the no-CD cracks, so everything had to come from the HDD. Same games, same patch levels...and they timed the level loads of specific battles. If you go through the game directories, some of these files can be rather medium to large in size.

Look, I'm not trying to be a dick. It wasn't too long ago that I'd argue with people because my Sisoft Sandra scores were through the roof in my Raptor Raid. It's only been a month since I broke my array for good and kept them single. I don't even have them in the same PCs anymore. My points I was trying to make to liquidtrance123 was that it seemed like a great idea, you felt like it was faster, but when you did some actual operational testing...you were disappointed with the results. I'm not screaming that it's useless...just that it isn't giving you anything wonderful. It makes me worry more about my data, despite backing it up as well.