IDE or SATA RAID upgrade?

[mleoanrd77]

I'd like to get some more speed out of my computer and I'm thinking that upgrading to RAID might give me this speed on my Graphic Design workstation. My question is, what is the best way (and cost eeffectivly) to make this upgrade given the IDE HD's I currently have? Do I need to upgrade my HD's to SATA? Would upgrading my MB to one that supports IDE RAID be a better solution, or is that taking a step backwards? Do my HD's need to be the same size to use RAID? My hardware is below. Thanks for the help! - Mike

Abit AN7 motherboard (below are the RAID specs)
- SATA 150 RAID
- On board SATA PCI Controller
- Support 2 channels SATA 150 RAID 0/1
Western Digital EIDE 200GB (8MB buffer) WD2000JB
Western Digital EIDE 120GB (8MB buffer) WD1200JB
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
1GB memory

 

[gaidin123]

Welcome to the AT forums!

RAID can be a complex and possibly unecessary step to take for some things. I highly suggest reading through this guide:
http://www.storagereview.com/g...000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/

That will explain all the ins and outs of all the RAID levels and what the tradeoffs are for RAID.

You mentioned graphic design. Are you looking to get increased performance while editing images or video? If so I would recommend you at least start by making sure all temp/scratch disks are on a physical hard drive that is separate from the location of your operating system and applications. That will help performance some. Monitor your RAM and CPU usage while doing the most intensive tasks. It's quite possible that you have bottlenecks there.

But back to RAID. You probably are interested in the equivalent of a faster hard drive. RAID0 (Striping) with at least 2 of the same hard drives (ie 2x WD200JB or WD200JD) will get you the most performance with the least cost . However you need to be aware that with 2 drives you have doubled the chances of losing all of your data should 1 hard drive fail. The RAID guide will explain in much more detail.

I think the most cost effective way of you increasing the performance of your hard drives given your current system is to buy faster SATA hard drives. The 10,000RPM Western Digital 74GB Raptor is the fastest non SCSI drive that I know of and they would make great drives for your scratchdisk and your OS.

Gaidin

 

[Gamingphreek]

Well with your current config the RAID config would take the size of the second drive. IDE and SATA wont be much different however SATA is the way to go if you have money because it is the future be it distant or near (or for that matter SCSI). SO you would only have 240GB in a RAID 0 array.

Your M/B does not support IDE RAID so to use it you could either do a software JBOD RAID through windows, or you could get a PCI card.

-Kevin

 

[mleoanrd77]

Thanks Gaidin for the link to the guide to RAID, it answered a lot of questions. I also looked into the specs for the Western Digital 74GB Raptor drive and I'm very impressed with the 4.5ms seek and 150MB/s transfer rate. Is it possible to have 2 of these Raptor drives in a RAID 0 configuration and see an increase in noticable speed?

Thanks for the skratch disk info too!

 

[gaidin123]

Yeah those raptor drives are very nice. I hope to buy one in my next major system upgrade...

A RAID0 of those drives would most likely increase performance over 1 drive but it definitely will not be 2x faster and I'm not sure it would be noticeable. Try browsing through some of storagereview.com's RAID/drive reviews to get a feel for how a 2 drive RAID0 might perform compared to a single drive. For what you are doing it may not be worth the cost vs. increased performance but if your company is willing to pay, go for it.

The scratch disk thing should help a decent amount. Also make sure to defrag the scratch drive regularly if you keep other files on it.

Good luck,
Gaidin

 

[Zepper]

With careful shopping, you can get equivalent SCSI for about the same money as a SATA card and Raptor(s)...
. This guy I know may still have some new 15k Quantum Atlas 73GB U-320 drives w/ at least 4yr. of warranty left. He was selling them for $185. each last I knew. Takes the Raptors and blows 'em in the weeds.

.bh.