Raid 0 vs 2 separate HD.

[LeeTJ]

what real advantage does raid 0 give you?? wouldn't putting your OS on one HD and your Program Files on the 2nd HD give you almost the same performance boost w/o ANY of the risks associated with Raid 0??

what is it w/ this board and Raid 0?

 

[techfuzz]

Really I can only think of disadvantages when dealing with raid 0. Without the +1 mirroring, if any drive in your raid 0 array dies you've lost everything. Performance increases that raid 0 offers are very little to none really. The best reason I can think of to use RAID 0 is to have VERY large partitions that cannot be easily accomplished with a single disk drive. When dealing with very large databases or log files would be the only real reason I can think of right now. Maybe others might think of some other use for them.

I don't use anything less than RAID 1 and everything here at work is at least RAID 1 for the OS or RAID 5 or higher for anything with critical data.

techfuzz

 

[eklass]

no it would not be the same.

the "risk" would be identical. the only additional risk by going raid is the fact that you're running 2 drives instead of 1.

the reason that using 2 drives, 1 for OS, and 1 for data isn't the same as raid 0, is simple.
think about how your computer accesses data. for the most part it loads the OS in the very beginning, and then accesses data most of the rest of the time.
say you only leave your computer on for 1 week before it needs a reboot. so you're utilizing the 1 "OS" hdd for what, 3 minutes while everything boots? the rest of the 1 week is spent accessing data, the other hdd.

raid 0 is stipping... where as if you have a 16K file, it would concurrently write 4K to drive 1 and 4K to drive2, and then concurrently write another 4K to drive 1 and another 4K to drive2 (assuming you're writing in 4K chunks). thus it only takes the time of writing 8K of data, instead of wirting all 16K to one drive. now this doesn't mean a lot if you're only writing 16K, but what happens when you're writing a 2GB file? now you only have to spend time writing 1GB of data since the 2 drives split the task of writing the file... theorhettcally cutting read/write time in half...

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: eklass
no it would not be the same.

the "risk" would be identical. the only additional risk by going raid is the fact that you're running 2 drives instead of 1.

the reason that using 2 drives, 1 for OS, and 1 for data isn't the same as raid 0, is simple.
think about how your computer accesses data. for the most part it loads the OS in the very beginning, and then accesses data most of the rest of the time.
say you only leave your computer on for 1 week before it needs a reboot. so you're utilizing the 1 "OS" hdd for what, 3 minutes while everything boots? the rest of the 1 week is spent accessing data, the other hdd.

raid 0 is stipping... where as if you have a 16K file, it would concurrently write 4K to drive 1 and 4K to drive2, and then concurrently write another 4K to drive 1 and another 4K to drive2 (assuming you're writing in 4K chunks). thus it only takes the time of writing 8K of data, instead of wirting all 16K to one drive. now this doesn't mean a lot if you're only writing 16K, but what happens when you're writing a 2GB file? now you only have to spend time writing 1GB of data since the 2 drives split the task of writing the file... theorhettcally cutting read/write time in half...

actually, i didn't say data. . I said use the 2nd HD for C:\Program files. i'd keep data on the first HD.

so, your OS loads, then you open your programs from HD 2 which access data from HD 1.

 

[BoberFett]

I highly doubt you could manually load balance the data from both drives. And running a single program will generally load its files sequentially. And a game can't be split across drives.

Two separate drives is nowhere near the speed of a RAID setup.

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: BoberFett
I highly doubt you could manually load balance the data from both drives. And running a single program will generally load its files sequentially. And a game can't be split across drives.

Two separate drives is nowhere near the speed of a RAID setup.

NO Where near??

hmmm. from what i've seen the speed gain in general apps is relatively small, what mb 5% by going from 1 HD to raid 0? there is also a speed gain, tho much less by going from 1 HD to 2, so how can you say NO WHERE near?? that's like one of those graph bars where they make them REAL long to emphasis the difference but if you actually look at the numbers it becomes like 2% difference.

don't exaggerate. if you want to make your point just state it. this isn't marketing class. it's just a tech forum.

 

[BoberFett]

I'm not sure how large the stick you crammed up your ass is, but you might want to pull it out.

If you're talking about a speed increase when opening a Word doc, Excel spreadsheet or your fapping material, then no RAID won't help any. And neither will using two separate drives. The system will load the app, and when that's done loading it'll load the file you requested. You'll see 0% increase in speed. RAID might get you the 5% you quoted.

If you're talking about a game loading faster that has to pull a couple hundred MBs of textures and models off disk, then RAID will show a marked difference. And as I said, no game I've heard of will allow you to span drives so if you want more speed out of two drives you'll have to RAID them.

 

[LeeTJ]

get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

Xwing. That's good. I'll have to remember that.

If you're going to question my assertions, then back it up. Run some benchmarks on RAID vs 2 separate hard drives and let us know how it comes out.

 

[Smilin]

Girls, girls stop all this fighting.


Let me try to settle it a bit.

LeeTJ you're thinking along the lines of having program files, operating system, pagefile and some other things on separate drives so the workload is spread. It's good idea for sure and yes, it would provide some performance benifits.

However, Boberfett is correct. Running a raid array does *almost* double the performance of the drives. There's a little bit of overhead but for all practical purposes it's about 190% of the speed of a single drive. The solution you propose LeeTJ really would come no where near the performance of a Raid 0 array.

X-Wing Fighter, hehe that is a pretty good one.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

so when you cant think of anything else to say, and bobertfett pulls out good info, you resort to something ignorant and lame? sorry dude, you definitely lost this arguement.

boberfett = 1

leetj = 0

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

so when you cant think of anything else to say, and bobertfett pulls out good info, you resort to something ignorant and lame? sorry dude, you definitely lost this arguement.

boberfett = 1

leetj = 0

for the unintelligent and those without sense of humor. boberfett asked me about a large stick up my ass so i made a pun on his name and asked him about the xwing fighter in his.

obviously bobberfett got it and so did the other poster.

 

[chizow]

Heh yep, the above dialogue is one of the reasons I tend not to join in a RAID 0 discussion, because it often deteriorates into the exchange we just witnessed. :Q One person asks the benefits of RAID 0 with a predetermined opinion that it simply offers no benefits, and when another person offers some potential benefits the OP challenges the assertion or simply doesn't believe the results.

Simple solution as Smilin said is to try it yourself. Honestly, its not expensive at all, as most people have 2 IDE drives in their rigs and many motherboards have onboard RAID controllers. PCI add-in boards cost as little as $30 for a quality software RAID card. If you have two old smaller IDE drives that are too small or two slow to justify using them standalone, throw 'em in a RAID 0 array and breath new life into parts that were thrown by the wayside.

I've found RAID 0 to be quite excellent, and having 1 large partition that is significantly faster in sustained throughput and disk reads is much nicer than having 2 seperate drives/partitions that are not in a RAID 0 array. No, you won't see a significant performance in burst activity which is the majority of HDD accesses anyways, or access times, but any work moving large chunks of data or sustained read/writes clearly favors a RAID 0 array over a single IDE drive. RAID 0 works well for a performance desktop particularly with multimedia editing/encoding/decoding, and as mentioned, in gaming as well. After switching to RAID 0, BF1942 load times were cut nearly in half. This is an extreme example, but when your rig is fast to the point where you are ALWAYS waiting on IDE devices as the only bottleneck, even a 15-30% increase in performance is well worth it.

Chiz

 

[MrDudeMan]

wow...you think everyone is dumb, eh? just because i didnt reference to it, i didnt get the joke? good one.

yes, i got your lame ass joke, very funny..hardy har har.



you are still ignorant and lame, so it doesnt really matter what you say about me.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: chizow
Heh yep, the above dialogue is one of the reasons I tend not to join in a RAID 0 discussion, because it often deteriorates into the exchange we just witnessed. :Q One person asks the benefits of RAID 0 with a predetermined opinion that it simply offers no benefits, and when another person offers some potential benefits the OP challenges the assertion or simply doesn't believe the results.

Simple solution as Smilin said is to try it yourself. Honestly, its not expensive at all, as most people have 2 IDE drives in their rigs and many motherboards have onboard RAID controllers. PCI add-in boards cost as little as $30 for a quality software RAID card. If you have two old smaller IDE drives that are too small or two slow to justify using them standalone, throw 'em in a RAID 0 array and breath new life into parts that were thrown by the wayside.

I've found RAID 0 to be quite excellent, and having 1 large partition that is significantly faster in sustained throughput and disk reads is much nicer than having 2 seperate drives/partitions that are not in a RAID 0 array. No, you won't see a significant performance in burst activity which is the majority of HDD accesses anyways, or access times, but any work moving large chunks of data or sustained read/writes clearly favors a RAID 0 array over a single IDE drive. RAID 0 works well for a performance desktop particularly with multimedia editing/encoding/decoding, and as mentioned, in gaming as well. After switching to RAID 0, BF1942 load times were cut nearly in half. This is an extreme example, but when your rig is fast to the point where you are ALWAYS waiting on IDE devices as the only bottleneck, even a 15-30% increase in performance is well worth it.

Chiz

good post

 

[alembic5]

You may want to check out this article... sheds some light on real world and theoretical advantages to Raid 0.
Linky

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: alembic5
You may want to check out this article... sheds some light on real world and theoretical advantages to Raid 0.
Linky

What he said.

See, see?? I told ya so

 

[LeeTJ]

I'm gonna take my surfboard and go HOME.

duuuuuuuuuuuude.

 

[Vonkhan]

If I may, according Anand (THE Anand of AnandTech) RAID arrays are "rarely useful for gaming systems". Also, RAID 0 improves games performance ONLY during "the game's first run or when loading a level". The only time a RAID 1 offers a small performance boost over a single drive is while reading from the array, same as RAID 0. RAIDs are good for disk intensive apps but dont make any significant difference for gaming usage. All this from "The AnandTech Guide to PC Gaming Hardware".

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: Vonkhan
If I may, according Anand (THE Anand of AnandTech) RAID arrays are "rarely useful for gaming systems". Also, RAID 0 improves games performance ONLY during "the game's first run or when loading a level". The only time a RAID 1 offers a small performance boost over a single drive is while reading from the array, same as RAID 0. RAIDs are good for disk intensive apps but dont make any significant difference for gaming usage. All this from "The AnandTech Guide to PC Gaming Hardware".

So what you're saying is that a RAID array will only increase speed when you're reading large amounts of data from the disk? I did not know that.

People aren't complaining about the fact that it takes 2 seconds to load a Word doc and they want it to load in 1 second. They're complaining about the fact that it takes upwards of a minute to load a games level and textures. RAID can drop that significantly.

 

[Vonkhan]

I didn't say that. Mr. Anand Lal Shimp did! Now, if u have a problem with that and wanna dis the big man of the forum's book

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Vonkhan
If I may, according Anand (THE Anand of AnandTech) RAID arrays are "rarely useful for gaming systems". Also, RAID 0 improves games performance ONLY during "the game's first run or when loading a level". The only time a RAID 1 offers a small performance boost over a single drive is while reading from the array, same as RAID 0. RAIDs are good for disk intensive apps but dont make any significant difference for gaming usage. All this from "The AnandTech Guide to PC Gaming Hardware".

No, it won't give you a higher FPS I'm quite sure of that. I will tell you that I can usually jump into a LAN game and grab at least one Armor and a Rocket Launcher before anyone else even appears in the level...there are other advantages to a fast computer besides a smooth fps to help your rail shot.

Also games have changed a bit since Anand published that book. BF1942, Unreal 2 and some others are getting monstrous load times these days....or so I've heard from others *without* raid/scsi.

With a few exceptions hard drive access is one of those things that most affects the "feel" of how fast your computer is. People don't notice what FPS windows maintains while dragging an app across the screen but they will notice how long that app takes to load.

 

[eklass]

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

so when you cant think of anything else to say, and bobertfett pulls out good info, you resort to something ignorant and lame? sorry dude, you definitely lost this arguement.

boberfett = 1

leetj = 0

eklass = 10 (for actually answering the question correctly initially)

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: eklass

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
get the xwing fighter out of your ass. PUNK.

so when you cant think of anything else to say, and bobertfett pulls out good info, you resort to something ignorant and lame? sorry dude, you definitely lost this arguement.

boberfett = 1

leetj = 0

eklass = 10 (for actually answering the question correctly initially)

except you were wrong about risk. you increase risk of losing everything if you raid 0. if you use 2 hd, you reduce the risk of losing everything.

this is assuming no backup. obviously you should have everything backed up. but it's also about recovery time. even if you have everything backed up, ur recovery time will be less with 2 hd than with 1 striped volume.

as i said in my initial post, if you have 1 HD for OS / Data and the other drive for Program files, backup is simple, just Image both drives. One drive goes out, you only need to restore ONE drive. a lot less time than restoring an entire stripe.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
except you were wrong about risk. you increase risk of losing everything if you raid 0. if you use 2 hd, you reduce the risk of losing everything.

this is assuming no backup. obviously you should have everything backed up. but it's also about recovery time. even if you have everything backed up, ur recovery time will be less with 2 hd than with 1 striped volume.

as i said in my initial post, if you have 1 HD for OS / Data and the other drive for Program files, backup is simple, just Image both drives. One drive goes out, you only need to restore ONE drive. a lot less time than restoring an entire stripe.

Which is why god invented Clone CD, Daemon tools, and massive amounts of cheap IDE storage. Even in the situation you described above, an OS/Data or Program File loss, you don't save much time. If your OS/Data drive dies, you lose a replaceable OS, but all of your irreplaceable data files. You also lose the links between your apps and your OS. This isn't as big a deal with games, as they can be launched standalone for the most part, but many apps simply won't run unless you perform some type of repair on them, which isn't much different from a fresh installation of the app. Anyone running RAID 0 w/out backup storage off the array should be shot, so I don't even think that comparison is relevant.

I keep a bit-by-bit image (thru CloneCD) of all my install CDs, games and any other frequently used apps that need to be in the CD drive on both my RAID array and my backup drive. If my RAID array dies (unlikely since I've only had 1 drive ever die on me, and it was a DeathStar), I'll be quickly up and running again with all my data and app images safely stored on my backup drive. MTBF is reduced on my backup drive b/c it simply isn't in operation 95% of the time, mostly for simple writes when I backup or save to it.

Launching games w/out any spin-up or disc-swapping is awesome in its own right. I'm not sure if I would bother to if I didn't have the gobs of storage that a RAID 0 array provides; I might be more concerned with capacity if I was running 2 drives instead of 1 massive array.

Chiz