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ATA or Serial Hard Drives
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I'll throw this in... raid is headache, especially when a drive fails. Unless you keep your system under a HUGE load, I can't imagine you'd see the benefit, outside of a benchmark suite. This is coming from someone with 2 gigs of ram on his home system! 🙂
Here's what I would suggest (and what I am running). Get 2 EIDE drives for your system. An 80 gig for your system drive and a 200 gig for the data drive. You can get each drive w/8 megs of cache on it. Put each on their own IDE channel. That's it.
Much less of a headache, no setup problems, no restore issues, and enough bandwidth to handle most applications out there.
If you really need the safety raid offers, add a 3rd drive, another 200 gig drive and back up nightly.
Here's what I would suggest (and what I am running). Get 2 EIDE drives for your system. An 80 gig for your system drive and a 200 gig for the data drive. You can get each drive w/8 megs of cache on it. Put each on their own IDE channel. That's it.
Much less of a headache, no setup problems, no restore issues, and enough bandwidth to handle most applications out there.
If you really need the safety raid offers, add a 3rd drive, another 200 gig drive and back up nightly.
Still like to know if anybody else can confirm if this set-up is a good for my situation - ready to purchase ASAP. I work on big graphic files for ads, posters, etc. sometimes in excess of 100-300mb ea. I work on 2-3 projects a month. photoshop, in-design, quark, golive, illustrator, Maya, etc. I really love to game as well though, and I really want to start gaming even more. I would like to start developing some mods for games, and possibly transistion my graphic work to the gaming industry. With that said, what is the best way to set-up this machine. I want the best of both worlds If possible - graphic work, and gaming.
borgmang:
How many ide master devices does the Asus mobo support ?
You have listed a dvd+rw & a cdrw drive right ?
I read on Asus's site that the mobo supports 4 hard drives, right ?
Well wouldn't your dvd/cdrom drives need to be set as master ?
If that's the case maybe you should look at this config:
dvd & cdrw set as master, then use 2 sata raptors as : drive 1 - boot & apps
drive 2 - games
Then get the 3Ware Esclade card for raid 5 for your business work w/ 4 - 120 WD se drives in raid 5
Regards,
Jose
How many ide master devices does the Asus mobo support ?
You have listed a dvd+rw & a cdrw drive right ?
I read on Asus's site that the mobo supports 4 hard drives, right ?
Well wouldn't your dvd/cdrom drives need to be set as master ?
If that's the case maybe you should look at this config:
dvd & cdrw set as master, then use 2 sata raptors as : drive 1 - boot & apps
drive 2 - games
Then get the 3Ware Esclade card for raid 5 for your business work w/ 4 - 120 WD se drives in raid 5
Regards,
Jose
I don't really see any need for the Raptors at all. I suspect that RAID 5 array will be faster in all respects, and it _is_ redundant, so there's no need to throw your OS and applications on an insecure RAID 0 setup. If you need any more space, you can move up to 160gb drives for a total of 480gb secure space for less than the price of a pair of Raptors.
After thinking and reading a bit more on this, I've come to these conclusions:
1) RAID 5 with a good controller is about as fast as RAID 0 on reads, but only a bit faster than a single drive on writes.
2) You seem to want to go for all-out speed and dont particularly want more space than, say, 250 gigs. You also seem to want to go SATA all around if possible, and need data redundancy. Correct me on these points if I'm making the wrong assumptions.
3) With 3-4 drives, the only way to get both super-high transfer rates and redundancy seems to be four drives in RAID 0+1. You sacrifice 2 drives for redundancy in this config instead of one like RAID 5, but that looks like a sacrifice that can be made.
4) For OS/app/game performance, the determining factor is seek time over all else. A WD Raptor will have a better seek time than the aforementioned RAID arrays, making it a good choice for a boot drive. Also, Photoshop tends to like having seperate drives for application and scratch space.
5) RAID 0 really doesnt help much with OS/apps/games, where sustained transfers are rare. I view RAID 0 as a waste of money for a boot drive, with double the risk of data loss.
5) Hardware RAID controllers like 3Ware or Promise SX are superior to the cheaper software-based controllers, but for 0+1 they're not a necessity like they are for RAID 5.
Hence, I'll reccommend this setup:
4x Maxtor 120GB SATA drives - $544
Promise FastTrack S150 TX4 - $97
Western Digital Raptor 36GB - $142
Total: $783
240GB redundant, double-speed storage space + 36GB 10krpm boot drive, and Serial ATA all around.
1) RAID 5 with a good controller is about as fast as RAID 0 on reads, but only a bit faster than a single drive on writes.
2) You seem to want to go for all-out speed and dont particularly want more space than, say, 250 gigs. You also seem to want to go SATA all around if possible, and need data redundancy. Correct me on these points if I'm making the wrong assumptions.
3) With 3-4 drives, the only way to get both super-high transfer rates and redundancy seems to be four drives in RAID 0+1. You sacrifice 2 drives for redundancy in this config instead of one like RAID 5, but that looks like a sacrifice that can be made.
4) For OS/app/game performance, the determining factor is seek time over all else. A WD Raptor will have a better seek time than the aforementioned RAID arrays, making it a good choice for a boot drive. Also, Photoshop tends to like having seperate drives for application and scratch space.
5) RAID 0 really doesnt help much with OS/apps/games, where sustained transfers are rare. I view RAID 0 as a waste of money for a boot drive, with double the risk of data loss.
5) Hardware RAID controllers like 3Ware or Promise SX are superior to the cheaper software-based controllers, but for 0+1 they're not a necessity like they are for RAID 5.
Hence, I'll reccommend this setup:
4x Maxtor 120GB SATA drives - $544
Promise FastTrack S150 TX4 - $97
Western Digital Raptor 36GB - $142
Total: $783
240GB redundant, double-speed storage space + 36GB 10krpm boot drive, and Serial ATA all around.
So then so I understand (sorry)
4x Maxtor 120GB SATA drives - $544 - Raid 0+1 - or no Raid? - Also, just strictly for backup/archive?
Promise FastTrack S150 TX4 - $97
Western Digital Raptor 36GB - $142 - 1st drive C: - set-up as single w/ no Raid for OS/ ALL apps/games
Also, I'm getting the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe board with on board Promise Raid controller, so do I need the Promise FastTrack S150 TX4?
Another thing - Do you recommened partitioning, and if so, how should I break it down. Plus, what about swap file, photoshop scratch file, where should I locate these files, and anything else important?
THanks...
The four Maxtor drives would be in RAID 0+1 on the Promise controller. The controller is necessary because you're going to be using 4 SATA drives in that array, which the onboard controller won't handle. The onboard controller has 2 SATA ports and 1 PATA port... it advertises that it can do RAID 0+1, but that's only with 2 PATA drives as master and slave plus 2 SATA drives. Naturally, you could go PATA all the way and save some money - cheaper drive, no extra controller, but you'd need two adapters for the SATA ports and you _still_ have the problem of runing two drives on a single PATA port, which is less than optimal.... in short, the onboard controller is gonna cause you headaches if you want to use any more than two drives on it. I'd just get the new controller, which has four real SATA ports on it.
The RAID array would be used for all "data". Save all your documents on it, all your MP3s, all your Photoshop files, etc. Not only is it large and redundant, its high sustained transfer rate makes it perfect for these larger files. Put on the Raptor all your "program files" - your OS, your games, your applications. Tell Photoshop to use the RAID array for its scratch file, because again, its going to be moving massive amounts of data. The swap file is gonna be slow wherever you put it... if your system actually ends up using it much, buy more RAM.
As far as partitioning, whatever floats your boat. I'd just leave it alone with a single partition spanning the whole disk.
The RAID array would be used for all "data". Save all your documents on it, all your MP3s, all your Photoshop files, etc. Not only is it large and redundant, its high sustained transfer rate makes it perfect for these larger files. Put on the Raptor all your "program files" - your OS, your games, your applications. Tell Photoshop to use the RAID array for its scratch file, because again, its going to be moving massive amounts of data. The swap file is gonna be slow wherever you put it... if your system actually ends up using it much, buy more RAM.
As far as partitioning, whatever floats your boat. I'd just leave it alone with a single partition spanning the whole disk.
WOW! Lot of information. I just read all from a-z and trying to digest. I came here looking for an information. I am about to get ASUS P4C800e and to setup my boot drive, I wanted to set it up on a SATA, but then the question arised, will it accept SATA as the boot drive? I guess it does. Any comment is appreciated.
RAID sounds good, if you can afford and set it up right. But for gamers, I quote from 'The AnandTech Guide To PC Gaming Hardware' where the write Anand Lal Simpi is discussing storage, "During normal gameplay there should be no noticeable disk accesses, otherwise you framerate surely suffers, so RAID 0 can't help you there." Also, "... the drawback of RAID 0 is the chances of your array failing are twice as great as a single drive failing." That's where RAID 1 comes to play, if one of the drives in your array fails, the other will continue. So Raid 0+1 is a good marriage (is it?).
"The most common applications for RAID 1 arrays are situations in which down time equates to money lost such as database or Web server."
Nice thing about RAID 5 is the ability of the re-construction of data in fail (any 1 drive), but it's also the slowest RAID implementation.
Someone asked about 3 drives. For RAID 0 and RAID 1, the minimum requirement is 2 drives. So my understanding is, you can have 3 drives or more. But for RAID 5, the minimum req is 3 drives. A third drive recieves a parity bit, result of a logical function (XOR) performance. Again I quote, "If any of the drives in the arry fail, the data isn't lost because it can be reconstructed using one data stripe and one parity bit. If two or more drives in the three drive RAID 5 array fail, the entire array and all the data on it is list."
You can download a file from MSI support website, which includes 2 files, a manual for MSI Neo 875P and the other file is a 24 pages manual describing Intel ICH5R Serial ATA Raid. Both are in pdf format. BTW, my initial decision was to purchase MSI 875P ICH5R. But since Asus released the P4C800e, I have changed my mind. Here's the
link.
Please throw all you comments/arguments and keep this goind, it gives you more knowledge (and sometimes misleading info):frown:
One question, and this maybe not the right place to ask or may have been asked and answered, but does anyone know that's the hard drive's highest data capacity for Asus P4C800e Deluxe? In other word, I raed that MSI 875P Neo supports upto 160GB. Since they are based on same chipset, is that also the highest for Asus P4C800e?
If so, how can I use a drive that is higher than 160GB? I don't wanna stick in an extra card in my mobo to just run a higher capacity drive.
:frown:
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