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How much performance gain on RAID than with 1 HD (same size)

S

SouljaAC

Member
I forgot which RAID it was, the 0,1,or5 which did the speed. Not the mirroring.

However, what is the performance gain (where do i see it)?

Is it worth upgrading?
 
RAID 0 - striping (speed)
RAID 1 - mirroring
RAID 5 - Mix of both (in essence)

I use RAID in my home system and I can notice a difference in load times, especially booting. Don't expect any more FPS - won't touch that. Pay attention to when you hear your HD "churing" the most. Those are the times that you'll notice RAID most (in my opinion).

Some people say that RAID doesn't matter in home systems, there's been a lot of debate about it on these forums lately. Personally I like it. Only thing I'd rather use more than IDE RAID is SCSI Hard disks, and if I could afford it, I'd do SCSI RAID.
 
I can definitely notice a difference in load times and HD intensive tasks with a RAID-0 array. It makes a computer just feel snappier to me.
 
Also, RAID performance greatly depends on the discs used. I just switched from 2x Maxtor D740X in RAID 0 to a single Maxtor DM9+ 120Gb SATA drive w. 8Mb cache... and the new Maxtor is quicker than my RAID 0 setup (Load times etc.)

Anyway, can't wait to get another DM9+... 😀
 
search "RAID" for several earlier long threads answering this exact question. Including archived threads will get you many more answer threads.
 
Originally posted by: SouljaAC
I want to know EXACTLY what is faster.

Is it only for boot times?
Click to expand...

Again, in my experience, benchmarks were the only thing where I really noticed a difference. With the addition of waiting for the RAID controller to detect the drives during bootup, I dare say overall bootup time was SLOWER with RAID 0.
 
Anything that requires HD activity is faster... if set up correctly.

Opening programs, pics, vids, and Windows boot time is faster. If the computer or a game uses the page file, that's faster as well.

How anyone can say a RAID-0 array, set up properly and with good drives does not make a noticable difference is beyond me.

BTW, the Intel ICH5R RAID BIOS boots in less than a second. A MORE than fair price to pay for the increase in performance.
 
I got a 20 buck silicon image 680 software raid card, and two old 40gb maxtor 2mb 5400rpm drives, and I get 65mb transfer rates. Windows loads a little faster, it does spend a little time recognizing the raid setup. But everything else is way faster, especially game load times. I play IL-2 FB, and this game took forever to load before, now its open in 5 seconds. The responce is great. I went from a 64kb stipe size to a 16kb stripe size, and its even faster loading games.
 
my system is much quicker with RAID0

I keep my OS/APPS on IDE, I use RAID0 for storage, I have about 140GB of movies on the array (mpg, avi, DivX)

My old HD would sometimes lag a bit during playback (jerky vid, sound out of sync...) with 2 of the same drives in RAID i have no problems with playback.

one negative feature i noticed with RAID0 is that it doesnt like to do multiple writes. it can hand 2-4 small writes jsut fine, but if i were to do it with several large files (700MB) the transfer will break and I get an error about "the path is too deep".

other than that I love raid, it's been really fast for my video library 🙂

Promise has some recomendations on their site, recommendations for RAID 0 include:
Dont partition your RAID
It's best to keep your OS off of RAID, and your page file on RAID
Keep in mind if one of your 2 RAID drives fails then you will loose data on both drives. (though your 2nd drive will still work, you'll just have to reformat it 🙁)
 
oh yeah, when I did HDTach benchmark it showed my RAID scoring a max of 74.9MB/s and the single drive was 37.6MB/s

(not that the HDTach benchmark is a good repersentation of performance)



one thing to consider when settign it up is your strip size. if you do plan to put your OS or Page file on it then you'll likely want a smaller size 16-64kb. I use mine for storage of large files, so i picked a larger size, 128, and i plan to change it to 256 in the near future.



The truth is that most Home users dont need RAID for anything, the exception being those doing video editing. But many of us appriciate the boost it gives. It wont make your PC faster, but it can certainly make disc access times faster (whenever you hear the HDD's crunching)
 
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