One HD = Bottleneck?

[melchoir55]

I have been doing a whole lot of research, looking to build a new gaming rig.
I'm going to go with an e6300 and a p5bdeluxe with firestix pc6400 RAM and overclock this sucker to 3GHZ. Then I'm going to shove in an 8800 GTS (that I got from Dell for 410 shippeD) and call it a day.

My question is, every now and then I come across someone saying that having one hard drive bottlenecks the system. I was going to buy one 320gig drive and I could buy another one if need be. I simply don't understand what sort of bottleneck is occuring. Is the person talking about have your operating system on one hard drive and you applications on another? Would that really increase performance?

 

[Scouzer]

no you misunderstand.

hard drives are the slowest part of a modern computer. so really, everything is always bottlenecked by the hard drive.

the 'solution' would be to RAID two hard drives, but this makes your data vulnerable, and its expensive.

 

[abs0lut3]

Whoa...

RAID is not always expensive and is not always makes your data vulnerable. I think he was referring to RAID 0...which is technically isn't RAID because you basically splitting your data into two hard drives or more in even numbers. RAID 0 creates redundancy (320GBx2=640GB unformatted) but it isn't secure because half of your data is on one HD and the other half is at the other HD. If one HD fails, you can be sure that you had just pretty much lost ever porn files you have in your HD.

JUST KIDDING (on the porn subject)!!

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or inexpensive) Drives. It was created at the time HD prices was sky high to the roof and won between buying larger HDs or running two that totalled into one larger capacity disk space without the expense of buying the larger hard disk.

The most basic RAID systems are RAID 0 explained on top and RAID 1 which is basically mirroring. The sole function of this RAID array is to backup user data and they are having it on both drives all at once.

RAID 0 is the fastest RAID system out there whilst RAID 1 is the slowest.

You still can, however, get the best of both worlds.

RAID 0+1 is basically data stripping and then mirrored to each other. It's second fastest compared to 0 but at least you'll know that your stuff will be saved instead of thrown away in case of "0"

RAID 10 is basically data mirroring with some stripping at the end. It's not as fast of 0+1, it workst just fine.

Setup should be straight forward.

 

[Seekermeister]

I realize that no one like Maxtor much, but my Maxtor 16MB ATA133 drive has a higher transfer rate than my SATAs, whether in raid or not. The Maxtor SATAs tested out on HD Tach at 114.8MBs and the PATA drive tested at a bit over 122MBs. Looking at the profiles that came with HD Tach, those are typical values. These are SATA Is, but I understand that SATA IIs aren't any better. The test was done with the SATAs in raid 1, which is a bit slower than raid 0, but not that much.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I do find working with video or any big files that having a boot drive, along with other storage drives *RAID5 for me* provides substantially better performance than trying to do everything with one drive. partricularly with dual-core CPUs allowing us to do better multitasking. Capturing and editing home video, or backing up a DVD collection, or working with tons of .RAR files or such, while still having other programs that need to access the boot HDD, are times when mulitple HDDs are handy IME.

 

[ebaycj]

Originally posted by: Scouzer
no you misunderstand.

hard drives are the slowest part of a modern computer. so really, everything is always bottlenecked by the hard drive.

the 'solution' would be to RAID two hard drives, but this makes your data vulnerable, and its expensive.

The best solution is to get 4 Serial Attached SCSI 15k drives and a PCI-E SAS RAID Controller with a LOT of onboard Cache memory (bump it up to 2 gigs if necessary). Then run RAID 0+1, which will give you a lot of speed and some insurance against failure. This will make pretty much any computer seem REALLY fast.

 

[biostud]

Having harddrives in RAID (0, 5 etc.) improve tasks limited by harddrive speed, like starting programs, copying files, loading times in games. But it will not give you more frame rates in games, so once the game is started you're not bottlenecked by harddrive speed. Having enough system memory is usually the best way to keep your system responsive, but if you often run multiple tasks with heavy harddrive activity RAID might be a good solution to you.

 

[melchoir55]

Thanks for the advice guys. With HD prices being so low I don't mind dropping an extra hundred bucks to bring me over .5 TB and setup a raid.

 

[Cogman]

As far as I can tell, RAID 5 is the safest, it needs 3 hard drives at least but It will give you a good preformance boost (not like RAID 0) and provide you with some backup if things fail. RAID 5 only gets better with the more drives you have (IE safer and faster). So thats the one I would go with. Wiki

After reading the wiki, if you are getting more then 3 drives RAID 6 might be better then RAID 5 as it is even safer.

 

[Cogman]

as well, I would just go with some cheap 80 gig hds (or 160gig). That would probibly be the best. qoute from the wiki...

RAID cannot provide a performance boost in all applications. This statement is especially true with typical desktop application users and gamers. Most desktop applications and games place performance emphasis on the buffer strategy and seek performance of the disk(s). Increasing raw sustained transfer rate shows little gains for desktop users and gamers, as most files that they access are typically very small anyway. Disk striping using RAID 0 increases linear transfer performance, not buffer and seek performance. As a result, disk striping using RAID 0 shows little to no performance gain in most desktop applications and games, although there are exceptions. For desktop users and gamers with high performance as a goal, it is better to buy a faster, bigger, and more expensive single disk than it is to run two slower/smaller drives in RAID 0. Even running the latest, greatest, and biggest drives in RAID-0 is unlikely to boost performance more than 10%, and performance may drop in some access patterns, particularly games.

 

[Auric]

Originally posted by: abs0lut3

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or inexpensive) Drives. It was created at the time HD prices was sky high to the roof and won between buying larger HDs or running two that totalled into one larger capacity disk space without the expense of buying the larger hard disk.

That should be "Inexpensive Disks" and I think the difference was in physically smaller HDDs as we know them versus whatever was common for business machines then and so not for greater capacity either (quite the contrary) but rather just for relatively cheap performance.

Yes, HDDs can be a signficiant limiting factor to intensive file tasks and individual drives can alleviate that but using them in RAID is not necessarily best. Certainly simple striping increases risk and reduces performance versus specifically assigning seperate tasks to independent drives (for example OS and programs on one while high-speed downloading and verifying on another) or to being read from one drive and written to another (large copy, extraction or video processing operations).

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: melchoir55
I have been doing a whole lot of research, looking to build a new gaming rig.
I'm going to go with an e6300 and a p5bdeluxe with firestix pc6400 RAM and overclock this sucker to 3GHZ. Then I'm going to shove in an 8800 GTS (that I got from Dell for 410 shippeD) and call it a day.

My question is, every now and then I come across someone saying that having one hard drive bottlenecks the system. I was going to buy one 320gig drive and I could buy another one if need be. I simply don't understand what sort of bottleneck is occuring. Is the person talking about have your operating system on one hard drive and you applications on another? Would that really increase performance?

op, quite a bit of "interesting" thoughts going on in this thread.

first, i don't think you misunderstood what the people were talking. when you have the pagefile on a seperate hdd you gain a bit of performance, but the performance is not that great. some programs have the ability to use other hdds intermittingly to write and retrieve data and if it is off the main drive you may see a difference.

imho, if you need 640GB then get 2 drive, but i would not raid them together for a raid0 setup. this puts your data at 2x as likely to get destroyed - bad idea.

if you need 320GB i would go with that. you will be hard pressed to notice a difference, especially if you don't have anything to compare to.

seekermeister - are you talking burst speeds? i would like to see screen shots because the fastest pata/sata hdds in str are the 7200.10 segates and they are under 100MB/s, in fact i think ~75-80MB/s or so. also, the str of raid0 should be nearly twice as fast as a raid1 setup, not ~10MB/s. something seems a bit off with your numbers. in fact the only drives that are over 100MB/s in the hdtach library i see in 3.0.1.0 are either in a raid 0 or 5 array.....

 

[isekii]

Originally posted by: Cogman
As far as I can tell, RAID 5 is the safest, it needs 3 hard drives at least but It will give you a good preformance boost (not like RAID 0) and provide you with some backup if things fail. RAID 5 only gets better with the more drives you have (IE safer and faster). So thats the one I would go with. Wiki

After reading the wiki, if you are getting more then 3 drives RAID 6 might be better then RAID 5 as it is even safer.

So if you're using a Raid 5 set up.

Lets say 160 + 160 + 160

do you get 480gb of storage ?

 

[Rubycon]

RAID5 has horrible sustained WRITE performance. Even with a large cache (2GB) on the host, your saves will fly until commit time then you have to wait. 🙁

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn
RAID5 has horrible sustained WRITE performance. Even with a large cache (2GB) on the host, your saves will fly until commit time then you have to wait. 🙁

ms dawn - do you have any idea what the substained write would be with say 3 320GB 7200.10 in raid 5? how bad is it? just curious....

thanks,
bob

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: isekii

Originally posted by: Cogman
As far as I can tell, RAID 5 is the safest, it needs 3 hard drives at least but It will give you a good preformance boost (not like RAID 0) and provide you with some backup if things fail. RAID 5 only gets better with the more drives you have (IE safer and faster). So thats the one I would go with. Wiki

After reading the wiki, if you are getting more then 3 drives RAID 6 might be better then RAID 5 as it is even safer.

So if you're using a Raid 5 set up.

Lets say 160 + 160 + 160

do you get 480gb of storage ?

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: bob4432
ms dawn - do you have any idea what the substained write would be with say 3 320GB 7200.10 in raid 5? how bad is it? just curious....

thanks,
bob

Well that would really depend on the host. If motherboard based probably in the 20 MB/S range. A good driver could adjust itself to the drive's firmware and balance cpu load accordingly for XOR calculations. But it's always a compromise.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn

Originally posted by: bob4432
ms dawn - do you have any idea what the substained write would be with say 3 320GB 7200.10 in raid 5? how bad is it? just curious....

thanks,
bob

Well that would really depend on the host. If motherboard based probably in the 20 MB/S range. A good driver could adjust itself to the drive's firmware and balance cpu load accordingly for XOR calculations. But it's always a compromise.

wow, i never realized it was that low :shocked:

now i see why people pay the big $$$ for the nice lsi or acrea(sp?) cards...

 

[imported_goku]

Originally posted by: abs0lut3
Whoa...

RAID is not always expensive and is not always makes your data vulnerable. I think he was referring to RAID 0...which is technically isn't RAID because you basically splitting your data into two hard drives or more in even numbers. RAID 0 creates redundancy (320GBx2=640GB unformatted) but it isn't secure because half of your data is on one HD and the other half is at the other HD. If one HD fails, you can be sure that you had just pretty much lost ever porn files you have in your HD.

JUST KIDDING (on the porn subject)!!

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or inexpensive) Drives. It was created at the time HD prices was sky high to the roof and won between buying larger HDs or running two that totalled into one larger capacity disk space without the expense of buying the larger hard disk.

The most basic RAID systems are RAID 0 explained on top and RAID 1 which is basically mirroring. The sole function of this RAID array is to backup user data and they are having it on both drives all at once.

RAID 0 is the fastest RAID system out there whilst RAID 1 is the slowest.

You still can, however, get the best of both worlds.

RAID 0+1 is basically data stripping and then mirrored to each other. It's second fastest compared to 0 but at least you'll know that your stuff will be saved instead of thrown away in case of "0"

RAID 10 is basically data mirroring with some stripping at the end. It's not as fast of 0+1, it workst just fine.

Setup should be straight forward.

Raid 5 is the best compromise between Raid 0 and Raid 1+0