will RAID0 make everything snappier

D

dyesan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 2, 2007
Messages
320
Well, I know it's a pretty over-played question, but I haven't come across any real conclusive answer.

Firstly, harddrive failure is not an issue. Data will be backed up. I don't really care for the "synthetic" tests such as burst speed, ect. The only reason I would put them is RAID is if I can benefit from any sort of real speed boost.

Question is:
Will three identical Seagate 7200.10 drives in RAID 0 stripe make OS boot faster, windows snappier, photoshopping faster?
 
Mm, I'm not sure if it will make a very noticeable difference from what I've seen. If you look at benchmarks which are aimed at servers and fire high numbers of requests at the disk then it's certainly significantly better. But benchmarks which use actual programs generally show little difference, and a single user environment does not fire many simultaneous requests (slightly older article, but the principle stands):
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/4
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/5
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/6

Look at the Photoshop test for example - it goes from 334 secs for one disk, to 332 secs for RAID0 with 3 drives. And in this test set, the single drive was faster than the RAID0 arrays at boot. There are advantages to be had in file creation/copying, however. Mostly, though, I personally think that RAID0 is just unnecessarily increasing your failure chances for minimal gains (I was about to write "on a desktop", but a file server probably wants an actually redundant array like RAID0+1 or RAID5 anyway).
 
it'll make it snappier and it'll make it snap-easier LOL

ok ok i don't know about snappier... but levels on games and large files will definately load faster...

I run raid0 for my OS for its obvious benefits... but i store no real critical data on that drive :D
 
As someone that has used several RAID 0 arrays over the years, I say it to me is noticeably faster. Many people argue that fact, but I am willing to bet most of those that recommend against it have never tried it. And as far as the supposed risk of failure, I have never had one fail, and my oldest one has been running since 2002, and still going. It obviously doesn't do much for anything that is not disk intensive, but run a virus scan or something similar, and it will take quite a bit less time.
 
when i sit at my machine and i hear both of my hitachis going crazy in beautiful harmony i think "yea, its worth it"

because 1....


is the loneliest number




running out of space though, seriously considering finding 2 more hitachi 80s and getting myself some more speed and space for more disposable data... i just never imagined i'd have more than 160GB of unimportant data :shrugs:
 
goodcooper said:
when i sit at my machine and i hear both of my hitachis going crazy in beautiful harmony i think "yea, its worth it"

because 1....


is the loneliest number




running out of space though, seriously considering finding 2 more hitachi 80s and getting myself some more speed and space for more disposable data... i just never imagined i'd have more than 160GB of unimportant data :shrugs:
Click to expand...

Always wanted to try a 4 disk array, never had a case they would fit in.
 
I would never consider running 3 drives in just plain RAID 0. In my opinion, the chances of failure are too high. That being said, I think RAID 5 or 1+0 is a much better idea.
 
I had four 74GB Raptors (WD740ADFD - newest revision) in a raid 0, and from my experience the boot times were not lower but higher by 1 second!!! Snappiness was also not present and it used 10% of my cpu. My transfer rate was 280MB/sec on average :) The seek times was lowered from 8.1ms to 5.3ms by using four Raptors in raid 0 instead of 1.

So to simplify if you want NOTICEABLE snappiness go for SSD drive it will lower your boot time by half and applications will load in blink of an eye. Use Raptors in Raid 0 for scratch disk (to store temporary video files that are being edited, downloads, and anything else that benefits from fast writing to disk)
 
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