Having trouble picking HDD setup for new system...

[skeedo]

See, originally I wanted to go with RAID5 for performance increase and redundancy, but from what I've been reading and people have been telling me, RAID5 performance seems to be pretty subpar. Then there is of course straight RAID0, but drive failure scares me there. Then theres also the WD Black's which have great performance w/o RAID.

What I'd really like to see is some comprehensive benchmarking graphs with RAID 0,1, 5 and single WD blacks. I'm a heavy gamer, and load times have always been the bottleneck in my gaming. On top of that, I don't really back up my data, so having it done automagically would be swell.

Interested to hear your suggestions

edit: also, what about RAID10 ?

 

[pjkenned]

Get an X25-M for load times. Back up to WD/Samsung/Segate greens or Hitachi 7200rpm drives. Done

 

[saratoga172]

Raptor. Game. Set. Match.

 

[ElenaP]

RAID 10 would be fine and fast, but at 50% capacity (and cost) overhead. For the same capacity, RAID 10 is at least twice the price of the RAID 0. Other than that, RAID 10 is generally the best option.

 

[Emulex]

just use raid-0 and backup. trust me on this one unless you can afford a real raid controller

 

[FishAk]

Be careful with Western Digital and RAID. WD drives no longer allow you to use the wdtler utility to turn TLER off for a RAID configuration. This means you need to buy their RAID approved disks for a substantial premium. I haven't tried, but I believe the regular drives would be completely unstable for RAID 0.


I use a set of 4x1TB Caviar Black REGULAR disks with the ICH10R controller in what Intel calls RAID 10, but I think is actually RAID 01. Every two to three weeks, the TLER causes my controller to boot one of my disks from the array. It's never the same disk, and when it happens, the entire system crashes, and I have to hit the big blue button to reboot. From BIOS, I then have to enter the controller, which always says that two disks have failed, and the system isn't boot-able- do I want to fix it? Well, of course I don't want to fix it... I just want to throw it out the window, and do all my writing with pen and paper from now on. So I hit Y, and magically one of the bricked disks is OK, and the other (of the two “failed”) will still be labeled broken, but the system is now labeled as boot-able with three good disks. I then have to select the broken disk, remove it from the array- which fixes the disk- tell the controller to include the now fixed disk back into the array, and reboot. At that point, everything loads normally, and once in Windows, the “broken” disk has data written to it again, and the array is made whole in about 5 hours time. With RAID 0, you would have to restore your OS/Programs image, and re-install your backup data. This used to happen a couple time a week, and was a little harder to fix, but the ICH10R driver v. 9.6.0.1014 helped.


The speed advantage between RAID 0, and RAID 10 or 01 is negligible, and the only real penalty is capacity. The difference between RAID 10, and 01 (ICH10R, advertised as 10 but actually 01, I'm fairly certain) is that 10 has more redundancy than 01. Both 10, and 01 can survive the death of one disk. They can each survive the loss of a second disk as well, as long as the second loss is the right disk. With RAID 10, the chance of surviving a second disk failure is 66%, whereas for 01, survival of the array is only a 33% chance.


Raid 5 is a poor choice. RAID 5, like RAID 0, is actually a delayed recycle bin- except that you can recover files from the recycle bin. The advantage of RAID 5 is that you can't fit as much data as with RAID 0, so you won't loose quite as much.

 

[skeedo]

Yes, read about the whole TLer deal with the WDs. So this is what I've decided to do...main OS drive will be single 1TB WD Black, and other drive will be 2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TBs in RAID0. This way I can have the reliability of a single drive for my OS, and have the speed of RAID0 for my games. Sound like a viable solution?

 

[Rifter]

better to put OS on a SSD, the smaller 40GB ones are cheap and big enough for a OS.

 

[FishAk]

I certainly agree with Rifterut, you'll be well served by having an SSD for your OS and programs. Your signature shows you're running XP, and if you stay with that, a 40GB drive is probably acceptable. However, if you plan on Windows 7, a 40GB drive is simply too small. If you can't afford an adequately sized SSD, you should wait till the price comes down, or your budget comes up. Remember, you can't use the whole drive, because 20-25% needs to be set aside for wear leveling. Also, you need to install your programs to the same place as your OS. If you don't, and for any reason you need to reinstall your OS, you will have to reinstall all your programs as well, and you will loose all your custom settings. With the OS and programs together, it's a simple matter to restore an image, and get everything back.


If you have 2x1Tb drives in RAID 0, make sure you have enough additional storage for anything on the RAID 0 array that you don't want to loose. There are many reasons for the RAID 0 to go Tango Uniform, and when, not if, that happens, everything that was on it will be completely gone. You can set up your backup utility to run every few hours, and to only back up stuff that has changed from the last time. As long as it's set up CORECTLY, you'll only loose the data from the time since the last backup snapshot was taken. Because you or your backup program can screw up, you should have an additional backup set that you only backup to once a month or so, and then, only after validating your normal BU.