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Is an IDE Raid setup worth it?

A

abu

Senior member
Hi guys,
I'll be building my new 900mhz t-bird system shortly and I'm having trouble deciding what kinda Hardrive i should by.

(I have a 20GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 Ultra DMA 66 in my current system)

The motherboard I will be purchasing is a Abit KT7 - RAID (Raid beacause of future scalablity)

Before i was thinking about getting a 45gb IMB 75GXP ... (no raid setup ofcourse)

Now I'm thinking of getting an Identicle Maxtor HD i have right now.

My main concern in speed + reliability ...

Should i get the IBM (IBM + Maxtor = 65GB) or 2x My Maxtor (Raid0) ??

Any and all comments would be appreciated.
Thanks 🙂
 
Probably not. Given the same amount of money, it generally makes more sense to buy a single giant, killer hd rather than two slower smaller ones and raiding them. RAID only speeds up transfer rates, but how fast a hard drive is also heavily dependent on things like seek time, which raid has no effect on. Plus when you use a raid 0, you effectively double the chance that your array may crash and burn and once that happens, you can't get the data back even if it happens to only one drive.
 
Unless of course, you want bragging rights, in which case RAID might be your thing. 🙂
 
One thing to note. IDE Raid takes a high CPU usage. I think the average on the KT-7 board is 25%-28%. Someone mentioned before though that you don't play a game while it's loading so it's somewhat subjective.

If it were me? I'd go for the Raid. Why? New games are HUGE! I'm talking 2-3gb installs. They take forever to load. Also since you currently have a 20gb Maxtor, adding another in Raid 0 will give you essentially a 40gb hard drive. The Raid 0 Maxtor's will be faster than the single IBM drive.
 
Just ordered a kt7-raid and a gxp75 45Gb like 10 minutes ago 🙂

If 45Gb isn't enough room in the future I'll pick up another gxp.
 
but remember raid 0, 1 drive dies, both drive dies... u can't recover off a stripe.. only a mirror.. but how many drives can u really have with ides..
 


<< Someone mentioned before though that you don't play a game while it's loading so it's somewhat subjective. >>



Do a simple check on this, play the game and watch the HDD led. Some games need to access the HDD during gameplay, for temp files and virtual memory.



<< but remember raid 0, 1 drive dies, both drive dies... u can't recover off a stripe.. only a mirror.. but how many drives can u really have with ides.. >>



This is certainly NOT true, one thing is true, RAID 0 offers no fault tolerance, if you have problems with one disk ALL of your data is lost. Now as for how many drives you could have with IDE, it only takes two to mirror, so that would not be a problem.

You write that you can't recover off a stripe but, as i'm sure you know, this only relates to RAID 0 (disk striping without parity) not RAID 5 (disk striping with parity) so you were a little careless there.


I don't think that anyones data is wortless enough to be on a IDE RAID 0 setup, you will loose it sooner or later, RAID 0 effectivly doubles your chanses of data loss, all data.

Then there are the other issues, increased overall access time, increased seek time, increase of CPU usage.. so the answer to your question is NO!

About the Abit mobo with RAID controller, well, i will not say anything, i have posted my opinion about this soo many times, so everyone here knows my standpoint on that board.

Patrick Palm

Am speaking for PC Resources
 


<< Do a simple check on this, play the game and watch the HDD led. Some games need to access the HDD during gameplay, for temp files and virtual memory. >>



Not if you have enough ram,with the price that now ram is at i am sure that with 256megs there will be very limited swapping if any.
 
I won?t get into the technical part of this for now, but I will offer a real-world example that I have encountered a while ago.

Windows ME loads in about 35 sec. on a single 15GB IBM 75GXP.
Windows ME loads in about 20 sec. on Dual 15GB IBM 75GXP's in a RAID-0 Array, using Promise Fastrak100 controller.

Games load noticeably faster, and Windows apps take 1/2 seconds to load... For me IDE RAID was well worth it.

Edit: Windows 2k took about 7 min. to re-install (on RAID) 🙂

 
Isn't there a motherboard with a more reputable RAID controller built in, I thought AMI had one out now? I'd make sure not to get something based on the chips used by Promise (Highpoint?), and go for an adaptec or AMI based controller.
 
I was gonna do IDE raid, now I'm going SCSI 160 instead. I think that taking the load off the CPU is better than the small speed increase I will get from an IDE raid setup.

DR
🙂
 

I Said:
<< but remember raid 0, 1 drive dies, both drive dies... u can't recover off a stripe.. only a mirror.. but how many drives can u really have with ides.. >>

You said:
This is certainly NOT true, one thing is true, RAID 0 offers no fault tolerance, if you have problems with one disk ALL of your data is lost. Now as for how many drives you could have with IDE, it only takes two to mirror, so that would not be a problem.


see the comma between raid 0, 1 drive dies ?

I only said in raid 0, if 1 drive dies, both dies and I also said u can only recover off a mirror which is raid 1. Mirror drives are slow anyway.

 


<< I only said in raid 0, if 1 drive dies, both dies and I also said u can only recover off a mirror which is raid 1. Mirror drives are slow anyway. >>



This was not your error, your error was that you stated that &quot;you cannot recover off a stripe&quot;. or maybe you were just being careless.

Surely you meant that you cannot recover off a stripe set without parity, now most of us understand that, but there could be newbies who don't know the concept of RAID, for them this could cause some confusion about striping.

Patrick Palm

Am speaking for PC Resources
 
generally speaking, raid either doesn't add enough performance, or is too much of a risk, unless you run a 0+1 setup. Which is just goddamn expensive, I'd rather go scsi.

bart
 
i have a cheap ide raid setup - 2 30gb gxps on a modded promise 66 card. $300 investment, so price is certainly right. raid is bootable and contains my c: drive, however, i ghost the c: drive to a old hd on the standard ide channel once a week - takes 5 minutes, and adds great peace o mind.
 
Get RAID, I did and it's awesome.

Don't worry about CPU utilization. It's not like your running a PII266 or something.

Don't worry about drive failure. If you only have one drive that can fail too. If your running dual monitors, you don't worry about 1 of them failing. And no, your chances for failure do not double.

Everything you do will speed up. Because your spending all this money to process information quickly (900Mhz, why not spend a little more so you can access it quicker. It's one of the slowest and most used components in any system, so any time you increase hd performance you will notice it.

Everything I do now seems snappier. Windows boots up faster, IE5 pops up faster, games load faster, etc.
 


<< generally speaking, raid either doesn't add enough performance, or is too much of a risk, unless you run a 0+1 setup. Which is just goddamn expensive, I'd rather go scsi. >>



Not true, RAID 5 (stripe set with parity) adds more performance than RAID 0+1 and it has fault tolerance, another plus is that it only requires 3 disks. You do not loose half your HDD space with RAID 5 as you do with RAID 1 or RAID 0+1, which is another good thing about RAID 5, you do however loose some of your capacity, which is used for parity information.



<< And no, your chances for failure do not double. >>



No, they don't, they more than double, not only do you have one more drive which could crash, you also have all of the other issues to worry about, a bad sector could be fatal for the RAID setup, a powersurge could ruin the RAID, and all of the other problems with HDD's that might happen, which with only one drive would cause some irritation, may very well cause your RAID system to crash and all information would be lost.

Patrick Palm

Am speaking for PC Resources
 
You said

This was not your error, your error was that you stated that &quot;you cannot recover off a stripe&quot;. or maybe you were just being careless.

Surely you meant that you cannot recover off a stripe set without parity, now most of us understand that, but there could be newbies who don't know the concept of RAID, for them this could cause some confusion about striping.



Wow, I didn't know we had to describe teh difference between raid 0 and raid 5, he asked about abit kt7 raid. The board doesn't even support raid 5 so how did you get raid 5 out of my mouth when I only said raid 0. I never said anything else. I never talk about raid 5 and no one here talk about raid 5 because the board doesn't support raid 5, so why confuse him even more when he's only asking about the abit board. if you tell him to get a scsi adapter with a adaptec raid card that supports raid 5 then I'll say you're correct but stripe means raid 0 which one dies u can't recover off the other, stripe with parity I'll agree with you is raid 5

Abit's website mentions nothing about stripe with parity which isn't what I'm talking about.
Ultra DMA 100
1. High Point HTP370 IDE Controller
2. Ultra DMA 100MB/Sec data transfer rate
3. RAID 0(stripping mode for boosting performance)
4. RAID 1 (mirroring mode for data security)
5. RAID 0 +1(stripping and mirroring)

 
I think IDE RAID is worth it for me anyway. I have two IBM 30gig 75GXP striped on my KA7-100 and the RAID support is only beta. I have had no problems whatsoever and I just back my stuff up on my back-up 20gig 75GXP. Also, it is much faster when working wiith larger files. I do alot of sound editing with wav files that get as big as 1.5gig. Working with files this large is like night and day with a RAID 0 set-up. Also, as far as the Highpoint chip goes, there were problems I believe with the U66 chip, but the ATA100 (hp390) is rock solid. Also, the Highpoint outperforms the Promise chip in my tests. Has anyone seen the large number of problems with the Promise chip on the Asus Athlon boards? It does make most operations a little faster, but day to day use it is not that big of a deal. I get like 46000 in the Sandra benchmark. Also, I am using Win2k and I installed it directly to my striped drive, no problem at all. I personally would prefer two striped smaller drives, than one large drive in a non-raid mode. All this worry about the failure of the RAID array is a non-issue with me. If you do backups you will be fine. One thing to keep in mind though is to try to keep the striped drives the same size and model. I originally had my 20gig and a 30gig striped, but it doubles the size of the smallest drive in the array. So with a 20 and a 30 gig, you get a 40gig drive, not a 50gig. Just my opinion.
 
If you have a cd burner and back up frequently, the RAID is woth it. If not, thats a high chance to take loosing your data. Depends on your priorities.
 
PCResources-



<< No, they don't, they more than double, not only do you have one more drive which could crash, you also have all of the other issues to worry about, a bad sector could be fatal for the RAID setup, a powersurge could ruin the RAID, and all of the other problems with HDD's that might happen, which with only one drive would cause some irritation, may very well cause your RAID system to crash and all information would be lost. >>



A bad sector could be fatal for 1 drive, a powersurge could ruin 1 drive.

The only way it could double IS IF you assume that 1 of the hard drives WILL go bad.

If you cross a street twice your chances of being hit by a car doesn't double if there are no cars.

I'm not saying the risk for failure doesn't increase. But the speed increase is well worth the risk.

Another way to look at it is this- You always have a risk of slipping and cracking your head open in the bath tub. Your chances of cracking your head open doesn't double if you take 2 baths. Why? Because the only way it could double is assuming that you had a 50/50 chance of cracking your head open. Or you knew that you would crack your head open 1 out of 2 tries. But we all know that the odds are better than that. (Or non of us would take a bath). The same with hd's.
 
umm actually yes, the probability of cracking your head open in the bath tub doubles if you take 2 baths no matter what the odds are... if it's 1/100 than taking 2 baths makes it 2/100 or 1/50... get what I'm saying? But in the real world it's more like 1 in a trillion and we don't take a trillion baths in a lifetime so that is why it is so rare.
 
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