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IDE RAID ... how good are they ?

Well, here's my experience and opinion:

1. Highpoint controllers (HPT366) are horrible (Newer ones may be better though). They may eventually work after tweaking, but I've never been so lucky. They slow down the boot times with their additional BIOS screen, and require special drivers which seem to be buggy and cause all sorts of instabilities, and in a few cases, dataloss (a friend's 9gig!)

2. IDE RAID can get you nice fast disk performance, at the expense/tradeoff of substantially less secure data. Your risk for data loss doubles with each drive you put into a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 splits your files across both drives, and if one drive dies, you essentially lose all data on both drives. The only solution to this is to run RAID 0+5, but only higher-end expensive IDE cards do this (Promise makes one I believe), and SCSI.

3. IDE RAID will run at the speed and size of the slowest and smallest disk in the array.

4. Maxtor drives don't work as well as the IBM Deskstar drives in IDE RAID configuration.

Conclusion: I wouldn't suggest running a RAID0 IDE setup, unless you make very frequent backups of your valuable data and keep your system GHOSTed well. Only then would the potential for dataloss be slightly alleviated.



 
yes you can... the only requirement (for raid 0 that is) is that the drives must be the same size (well at least the partitions must be the same size).
 
"Highpoint controllers are horrible"

Well now there's a nice blanket statement. There was some problems with the early U66 ones, but the new 390 on the KT7 RAID and others works great. I have been using mine to stripe two IBM 75GXP's and it outperforms the Promise chip in my tests. I was able to install Win2K directly tot he striped drive no problem at all and with Sandra I get like 44000 or so and a buffered read of 91mb/s..that's almost using the full bandwith that ATA100 provides. The Promise chips also work well. As far as tweaking, I am not sure what you mean. I am aware of no "tweaks" for these IDE controllers...I just installed the drivers and that was it. There is an increased risk of data loss, but if you back stuff up, you will be fine.
 

Have been running the Promise FastTrak
U33 RAID's for a long time under Windows98.
No problems. Good performance for its day. Been running like that for
over a year without a problem.

More recently have been running a 3Ware 5200 Escalade IDE RAID
on two currunt rev Seagate disks, under Redhat 7.0, and I'm getting
awesome performance, between 25MB/s-40MB/s depending. Significantly
faster than a non RAID setup. Only drawback: 3Ware's forced a 64KB
stripe size, so you gotta live with their choice. No problems yet.

(I'll echo the Highpoint caution. Their U66 stuff under Linux is just
scary unpredictable. I'm running with it, but it scares me.)
 
IDE RAID is pretty much junk. One of my friends had a Promise RAID controller and 2 Maxtor 80GB drives. Now this combination was notorious for not working properly a while back. The setup worked and performed as expected for a whole week. Then one of the drives died. Obviously everything on the stripe gone with it.

Personally I have a ABIT KT7 RAID and I tried hooking up 4 WD drives to the thing. It would setup the array fine but lock on format no matter what I tried. I tried setting up a RAID 0+1 array. The wonderful BIOS told me that the 4 identical drives I had were not enough. Apparently there is a way to hook up more than 4 IDE drives to 2 channels on the Highpoint controller....

I actually was able to set up a 4 drive stripe using win2k software RAID. The STR was pretty good, mid 50MB/s and barely a CPU hit. Still, I wouldn't in a million years trust a 4 drive IDE stripe, so that is gone.

All of this ignores the fact that IDE RAID performance just isn't that good for typical computing tasks, despite what the fans will tell you. A high RPM SCSI drive will torch an IDE RAID setup in the vast majority of computing tasks.

"I'm getting awesome performance, between 25MB/s-40MB/s depending. Significantly faster than a non RAID setup"

Uhh... there are probably a dozen hard drives including a bunch of IDE drives that attain that performance on their own.
 
I love how everyone makes statements like "Highpoint Controllers are horrible", and "IDE Raid is Junk", i think its funny.

I have not had one single problem running raid-0 on my KT7-Raid, which many of you know, has the highpoint ide controller. the disk speed is incredible, transfer rates are great, and I am very happy with them. Plus they were a snap to setup. Im at work right now, so i dont have the exact rates but i can tell you that its far better than what my drives normally were before utilizing the raid.

(now as far as USB on the board, thats another story)
 
Since we're on the topic...
Next year, I am considering building a very large file server for my domain. I am considering the use of an Adaptec IDE RAID controller with 4 IBM Deskstar 75GB drives in a RAID 5 array. My question is this, what can I expect from this setup? I would like to use this file server for many tasks, including roaming profiles, disk/Ghost images, file shares, install directories, etc. I know I will have to put at least two NICs in it to keep up with the workload, but will the drive array live up to expectations?
 
Great thread.

Have never set-up/config'ed an array, but researched the Q. Found more horror stories than success .. like here. Opt'ed for SCSI. Heard best chance of success is with identical drives.

Read in another thread that a RAID controller adds between 1 & 3 ms to the access time. Can anyone confirm?
 
I'm using the Highpoint controller with no problems (Abit HotRod 100+ 2 30gxp's). Yes, there are horror stories of the old chipset. Just make sure you get the newer version. As far as reliability, no problems so far. As far as speed, it's awesome and well worth any risk incured by going raid 0. I recommend getting matching drives though. I've tried it with a slow and fast drive, and the performance was only slightly higher than the fast drive.

Radboy- As far as access times go. Everybenchmark I've run has actually shown a 1ms faster access time on the raid. Ofcourse I don't know how accurate any of the hd benchmarks are, but in everything I do it feels faster.
 
"All of this ignores the fact that IDE RAID performance just isn't that good for typical computing tasks, despite what the fans will tell you. A high RPM SCSI drive will torch an IDE RAID setup in the vast majority of computing tasks.

"I'm getting awesome performance, between 25MB/s-40MB/s depending. Significantly faster than a non RAID setup"

Uhh... there are probably a dozen hard drives including a bunch of IDE drives that attain that performance on their own."

Well, let's start with the first part. It is true that a SCSI RAID set-up will beat a IDE RAID set-up, but you must factor in the extra cost of a SCSI card and the high price of SCSI drives. Next, you make some claim that people think 25-45mb/s is a great RAID speed. First of all, that data transfer rate is not very good for a IDE RAID set-up. Like I said in my previous post, which I guess you chose to ignore because it didn't fit with your feelings on IDE RAID, I get 91mb/s with two striped IBM 75GXP's. That is damn near using the total bandwith that ATA/100 provides. I am using a KA7-100 with a BETA bios that allows RAID through the highpoint, and it has been running fine for almost a year now...guess I should just dump it cause you say it's unreliable. You also say that RAID does not make too much of a difference in everyday computing tasks..this is true to some extent. Regular apps in windows will not benefit too much from IDE RAID, but when working with large files like 800mb+, it makes a HUGE difference. I do alot of editing of WAV files that get as large as 1.5GB...IDE RAID makes working with them a breeze. I guess it just depends on what your personal idea of "everday computing tasks" entails. As far as you not being able to set-up RAID on the Highpoint on the KT7 RAID, I guess you just are unlucky. I have set-up IDE RAID on 5 of my friend's KT7 RAID boards, and on 4 friend's KA7-100 boards, all with absolutely no problems.....I guess I must have just got lucky with that "IDE RAID JUNK". 😛
 
"It is true that a SCSI RAID set-up will beat a IDE RAID set-up, but you must factor in the extra cost of a SCSI card and the high price of SCSI drives."

I'm referring to single SCSI drives, not SCSI RAID. Yes it costs more, but you get what you pay for.

"Next, you make some claim that people think 25-45mb/s is a great RAID speed."

No, I didn't. Beatnik did. I was pointing out that there is something wrong with his array, as it should be faster than that. 25-45MB/s is standard for single drives now a days.

"I get 91mb/s with two striped IBM 75GXP's."

Uhhh, I hope this is a joke. Let's see, one GXP maxes at about 37MB/s. Even under the ideal conditions of 2 RAID drives = twice the performance (which is rare if not fantasy), that would be 74MB/s. I find it amusing you don't see the folly in that number.

"I am using a KA7-100 with a BETA bios that allows RAID through the highpoint, and it has been running fine for almost a year now...guess I should just dump it cause you say it's unreliable."

There are plenty of people who have gotten it run ok, but there are far too many people who have had problems and lost drives for anyone who is concerned about the integrity of their data to use this setup. The only other personal experience I have had with RAID, is a friend of mine who tried RAID'ing to DiamondMax 80's on a promise card. Ran fine for a week, then one drive died, obviously killing the data on the stripe.

"I guess it just depends on what your personal idea of "everday computing tasks" entails"

Everday tasks do not include working with files larger than maybe an mp3 for the average user. RAID setups are ideal for high level A/V editing. But very few people do it to the level of actually needing RAID. IDE RAID is still junk. There are far too many horror stories on the net for any sane person to use one of these. This isn't like a video card, where if it dies you just send it back and get a new one. Sure you can replace the hard drive, but your data is gone forever, and that's not a risk most people want to take.
 
When he say 91mbs I think he's talking about the maximum burst rate. Average read speads on RAIDed GXPs have been recorded in the lower 40s and that's pretty fast.
 
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