Need Advice On Hard drive set up

[Sharpie]

I have two 60 gig hard drives and am debating if i should go raid0. The issue is the hard drives are not identical in performance... Even though nero isnt the perfect hard drive benchmarking utility it does show ballpark figures. Nero reported my old drive as being 40,800 Kb/s and the new one being 51,800 kb/s.

The question is should I bother going raid 0 or just boot off the newer drive? I also believe the older drive has 2mb cache(possibly 4mb max) where the new one has 8mb. My thought is that at most raid 0 will give me +15% but generally +10% performace boost which using the old drives performace spec (since the array should be as strong as the weakest link) ill get abround 46,900kb/s. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

[Ketchup]

Assuming you select the correct stripe size for your needs, the RAID0 Array should be faster than the faster drive running by itself. I have always had a mismatch when doing RAID0 arrays, and have ALWAYS found the RAID array to be faster.

 

[AngryKid]

I agree with ketchup, I think the final result will be faster than either of the drives individually.

 

[beatle]

I would not go with Raid 0 for several reasons:

[*]Doubling your risk of data loss
[*]Minimal performance gains (your seeks will still be slow)
[*]Lose the ability to compress, decompress, backup, etc. from one drive to the other, dramatically increasing throughput of the action being performed.

Since these drives are not identical, it's going to degrade the performance boost (if any) by striping them.

 

[whovous]

Previously, I ran mismatched drives in a RAID 0 striping. Both were 7200rpm, but one was a Maxtor 60Gig with a 2 meg cache, while the other was a Maxtor 80Gig with an 8 meg cache. As expected, the RAID bios treated them as two 60Gig (i.e., a single 120Gig) drives. Every once in a while, and quite out of the blue, the system would simply freeze to the point that only the reset button would get its attention.

Did the drive mismatch cause the freezes? I do not know. I do know that I have replaced the smaller Maxtor with an 80Gig/8 meg WD "Special Edition." The only difference between the two drives basic specs now is that the Maxtor is an ATA-133 while the WD is an ATA-100 drive. I have been using these drives in a RAID 0 striiping for a few months now, and they have yet to freeze up on me.

I also think they are faster, but that is just my gut reaction as I have no benchmarks to back up my belief.

 

[Ketchup]

Originally posted by: beatle
I would not go with Raid 0 for several reasons:

[*]Doubling your risk of data loss

Raising them from miniscule to very smalll, I doubt he will notice. I never did.

[*]Minimal performance gains (your seeks will still be slow)

A well set-up RAID array is noticably faster. Try it sometime.

[*]Lose the ability to compress, decompress, backup, etc. from one drive to the other, dramatically increasing throughput of the action being performed.

Although I haven't tried it, I think you can still compress with a RAID Array with NTFS, and of course, there is always WINRAR and the like. And why can't you backup? I set up two partitions when I setup my hard drives so I have a backup of everything.

Since these drives are not identical, it's going to degrade the performance boost (if any) by striping them.

But there most likely WILL BE a performance boost. I put together an IBM 120GXP and Maxtor DiamondMAX Plus 9, and my Sandra score went up by 65% over the Maxtor by itself, and 100% over the IBM by itself. Now, the real-world gains weren't that big, but they were noticeable. You shouldn't knock RAID0 so much. Have you even tried it before?

 

[beatle]

Raising them from miniscule to very smalll, I doubt he will notice. I never did.

I'm glad you never had a drive fail. I ran 2 40 gig drives in Raid 0... until I had one of them die and destroy all my data. Statistics dictate that if 2 elements in a system are required to keep the system operational, you compute the probability the entire system will go down by multiplying one element's failure rate by the other.

A well set-up RAID array is noticably faster. Try it sometime.

It's faster in benchmarks, but how much faster in real world applications? I'm talking RAID 0 on ide drives, not SCSI. Try running one of your drives by itself and see just how similar the performance is.

Although I haven't tried it, I think you can still compress with a RAID Array with NTFS, and of course, there is always WINRAR and the like. And why can't you backup? I set up two partitions when I setup my hard drives so I have a backup of everything.

I'm not sure if I made myself clear about this. What I was referring to would involve having an archive such as zip or rar on one drive, and decompressing it to another physical drive on another ide or SATA channel. I found this much faster than having the archive and decompressed files on the same array. Setting up two partitions on the same physical media is not redundant data storage. If you have a physical drive failure, you lose the data on the ENTIRE physical disk, not just that partition.

But there most likely WILL BE a performance boost. I put together an IBM 120GXP and Maxtor DiamondMAX Plus 9, and my Sandra score went up by 65% over the Maxtor by itself, and 100% over the IBM by itself. Now, the real-world gains weren't that big, but they were noticeable. You shouldn't knock RAID0 so much. Have you even tried it before?

Exactly, the real world gains weren't that big, which is what really counts. Any sysadmin worth his salt will never run RAID 0 because the possibilty for downtime, and more importantly, data loss is too great for the performance increase, even when running reliable scsi drives. When you factor in the higher rate of failure for a raid 0 array, how much is that scant performance boost worth to you?

 

[whovous]

What I do periodically is Ghost the whole thing to a third drive. I guess it helps, though, that nothing I do on this machine is mission critical. If I lost everything I would soon get over it.