For those thinking about running RAID

[JavaMomma]

RAID is not for everyone.
It depends what you are doing and the cost.

Sometimes it is cheaper to buy two smaller drives and RAID0 them then it is to buy one larger drive.
The reason I picked two 36GB Raptors was the fact that it cost less then one 72GB Raptor.

I also do alot of database work. I do not know if it is the Raptors the RAID or both but the speed gains over my old system in copying, backing up, and replicating is very dramatic and the databases I am dealing with are not even big. The largest ones are only about 1GB (+- 100MBs or so). I'm glad I have these Raptors instead of a couple hundred Mhz. Well worth the cost for me. (Also the 5year warranty is awesome)

However, I think that review is right for about 98% of computer users. But did they really need to run a benchmark to tell us RAID would not have anything impact on divx encoding? I was expecting the next page to have a UT benchmark and have them declare RAID does not increase FPS.

Anyways my point is that we shouldn't go slamming RAID just because it not that useful for most people because it does have its place. Also if you have two identical drives and you make regular backups anyways, why not RAID 0 them?

 

[Jeff7181]

Hey... with a RAID 0, how does Windows see the cluster size? Does it see the actual cluster size of the NTFS partitions on each drive? Or does it see the stripe size? If it only see's the stripe size, I wonder how performance of a single drive would be effected if you made the cluster size the same as the stripe size in the RAID 0 setup.

 

[sunase]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
What would be more practical, and I can't figure out why no manufacturers are even attempting it, is drives with "dual" heads positioned 180 degrees from eachother. Either head can be reading or writing at the same time...

There is actually a fairly current CD-ROM drive out that does this to get insane read speeds (well for optical disks anyway), although I think I remember it using 5 heads or around there. Also head-per-track drives (and magnetic drums, lol) were actually the predecessors to modern flying head designs.

Main problem AFAIK is that the heads are hideously expensive. Consider floppies and cd's - amazingly cheap vs. hard drives since they have no heads, but rather use the ones in the drive. ^^ With density and spindle speed constantly increasing for hard disks I imagine the heads are increasingly even more advanced and expensive since that's the part that has to ramp up in accuracy/sensitivity to handle those things.

Anyway, re the parent, I consider RAID 0 eminently practical. Hard drives don't fail very often and I have to backup my essential data even when not using RAID 0 anyway. I have to buy a large number disks to store as much as I want anyway. I do come across situations where what I'm doing is largely disk transfer speed limited. So taken all together why not RAID them together? Not using RAID is like having multiple processors and saying you refuse to use more than one of them for the same job (imagining processes were as insanely easy to parallelize as large disk operations anyway ^^).

 

[JavaMomma]

I have 128KB stripe size and according to Disk Defrag. I have 4KB cluster size.