Anyone used Matrix RAID yet?

[batmanuel]

I'm building a new PC for my wife using the 915PBL mobo that came with the Retail Edge bundle. I haven't got the board yet, but it is supposed to support "Matrix Storage Technology" otherwise known as Matrix RAID. I've been toying with the idea of getting two drives and doing a 0+1 setup using two partitions on each drive: RAID-0 for the OS partition, RAID-1 for the data partition.

I'm really more interested in backing up the data (since her PC is going to have all of our financial info on it and other important stuff) more than the tiny performance increase RAID-0 would bring, but with if I can get both with the new Intel tech using only two drives I figure I might as well.

I'm just curious what happens in the event of a drive failure with Matrix RAID. Your RAID-0 partition is fubar'd, that's for sure. But can you go back into the RAID BIOS and "unRAID" the OS partition, ghost the OS and apps back on it and continue working with the PC immediately without hurting the RAID-1 partition (so you're not down the whole time the drive's being RMA'd)? Or would it be better to wait for the replacement drive to come in, rebuild the arrays and then ghost back the OS partition back?

Just wondering how if anyone has tried doing 0+1 with a pair of drives yet and if they had any horror stories to share before I attempted it.

Also, on a related note, for general usage/office apps, would it be worth getting a pair of 36GB Raptors (assuming I can find a good deal at Fry's on them in the next few weeks) or would there not be a huge improvement over using a pair of Seagate SATA drives w/ NCQ? Storage space isn't a huge issue for her, but she wants as fast and responsive as system as I can build within a reasonable budget (I've got about $200 budgeted for storage). I've also been looking at the Maxtor 16MB cache drives with NCQ as well, but I'm not sure if I trust my data to even the high end Maxtor drives and two of the Maxtors w/ NCQ for RAID would blow my storage budget.

 

[sunase]

Just for the record, "0+1" means mirroring two RAID 0 sets. It's just kind of weird seeing it used to mean something completely different in your post. ;p

Re the drives, remember smaller drives tend to be slower as well. I happen to like queuing a lot. I had a really busy personal server that was taking a loooong time just to look through the folders on the busy drives. I switched over to SCSI (which has command queuing) and it was solved immediately.

So if SATA controllers can finally make use of NCQ, and you tend to have multiple things working at the disk at once, it would be a good thing to have. Otherwise the nice seek times on the Raptors might be better.

 

[larciel]

havent had chance to test matrixraid yet but i have recently played with almost all of HD you mentioned.

1. seagate sata w/ ncq (raid 0 )
2. maxtor DM10 200gb sata w/ ncq (raid 0)
3. raptor 74gb (single dr)
4. maxtor DM10 300gb sata w/ ncq (coming) (r0)

simple answer? raptor is fast, fastest of em all. you can tell the difference from real usage. those minor differences in graph in web-reviews can sometimes be confusing, but yes, raptor is fastest.

i haven't done raptors in r0, but seagates in raid0 easily bested single raptor.

i tested out cheap 200gb maxtor and had HORRIBLE time getting it to work.

i just ordered 300gb DM10, hopefully it'll work better than 200gb one.

paid about $360 total for two 300gb one, so i guess it'll be not bad upgrade from 7k250

 

[batmanuel]

I've been kinda leaning towards the Seagates. I figure with NCQ enabled and a RAID-0 partition for the OS and apps it ought to be pretty fast (not SCSI fast, but fast for ATA technology). I also figure they are about the best acoustically, which is also a concern with this build as well.

 

[larciel]

so have you had chance to use matrix raid yet?

i'm thinking about dividing my maxtor into several partitions using RAID 0 and RAID 1 ..

 

[batmanuel]

Not yet. Money got a bit tight and I had to downgrade the hard drive to a single Seagate 7200.7 w/ NCQ (which went from $88 at Newegg to $105 since I ordered it, which is weird). Down the road if I can catch some Raptors on special I may try it, though. The 36GB models have nowahere to go in price but down.