Raptor Questions

[ohnnyj]

Hello all:

I wanted to know if anyone has had the chance to try out some different 74GB Raptor configs or know of how these various configs would perform.

Some articles on the web indicate that RAID-0 is not beneficial to desktop users, is this true? I have seen competing articles that show huge performance gains from two drives.

Would 3 or 4 drives make it even faster?

What about onboard controllers vs. dedicated add-on boards. Have the on-board controllers become just as good or are they lagging in terms of performance?

Thanks.

 

[Scheizekopf]

The articles I've seen show advantages for most stuff. Tiny disadvantage for gaming.

 

[jnex26]

It works like this. There are many people on the web that will quote page after page of websites stating that raid is not beneficial to you. They will keep on by saying that access time is everything.

Obviously they are not wrong, but neither are they right. Nor are the raid fan boys. the main problem with raid is if you have a havily fragmented disk your gonna be slower than a single disk. (Two heads do take longer to seek than one)

Apart from that, Seek time in a raptor array is in the region of 7ms, which is not slow by any terms. However there is a definitive slowdown from a single raptor. But this is where the speed come into play.

If your using a PCI card, Don't even bother with RAID. the bus is a major problem for RAID arrays and it will induce some very uneven spikes. This is unless you pay for a mega Uber expensive hardware controlled RAID card. But Onboard is diffren you can get alot more speed (In Benchmarks) out of RAID array, and for bragging rights it's awesome. However what you've goto remember is that, this speed may not translate into improved performance. Now I'm basing the next bit on my own personal experince of raid arrays.

depending on configurations and drive uses you may come to diffrent conclusions.

The one thing that everyone agrees about raid is the array stripe size (16K) as I found is quite fundemental it seems that none of the "cheaper" PCI or onboard raid solutions can effectivly handle anything more than that.

I would like to note that I saw significant speed increases when I switched to RAID however I do alot of working with LARGE video files.

P.S.

Please Excuse Grammer and spelling..... Felling deadly ill this morning, and for some reason I felt I had to work.........(Then surf the forums)

 

[xyoufailmex]

It really is about what you want to do... On one hand, Raid0 is awesome because of seek times in working with larger files, on the other handle, the huge increase in unreliability makes me shudder... I personally believe that one 1 Raptor on a onboard controller with a nice 200gb Caviar drive is your best bet.

 

[FunkStar]

I'm on 2 36gig raptors in raid0 and everything showed improved load and install times. People will say it isnt beneficial but that depends what you mean. For loading games, large files etc it kicks ass. But if your just listening to MP3's and browsing then theres no real point. Windows is alot faster overall in Raid-0 and boots rather fast too

To put it simply, Raid-0 is faster and funkier so long as you don't use it for storage. I reinstall every two weeks or so which means my drives never get fragmented so i never get a performance hit cause of that.

for 3 and 4 drivers in raid-0 the performance gains sought of hit their limit. The gain from 2 drives over 1 is like 33%ish, 3 drives over one is about 42% and 4 is like 48%(very rough numbers) so getting more can be better if you make sure to get a good controller, a shite controller will use lots of CPU powa with 4 drives to work which is

Just stick with 2 in Raid-0 with an onboard (if you have it) controller. If you wanna get 3 in raid then fork out a few hundred $$$ and get a mega controller instead of some POS.