RAID 0 worth it?

[Murr]

Originally posted by: grant2

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
It's at least twice the cost, often more to get a decent controller that utilizes as little CPU time as possible.

If disk access is what's slowing down your system, CPU use is likely non-issue.

I dunno, some onboard controllers really suck, I've seen some pretty high CPU usage percentages.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I just discovered that partition to partition file copies fly now. On one hand, it makes sense because only about half the data should need to be copied on each physical drive (on average, just like everything), but it seems faster than even that should account for, and I think it is due to not using the nforce2 IDE controllers. They're basically fast enough, but always seemed to be a little high on CPU usage (even though HDTach only showed a few percent) and copying between partitions was always SLOWwwww, but copying to other drives wasn't; for some reason needing to transfer data on the same physical drive took longer. (HDTach shows like 14% CPU usage with the TX2000, but it isn't noticeable.)

 

[bupkus]

I just installed my first RAID system. I had this Epox 8K5A2+ (with onboard High Point) in a kid's machine so I swapped it for an ECS I had.
I used the Epox with W2K Advanced Server (first install of that OS) with Raid 0 and it appears in general usage to be significantly faster than other installs of other OSs.
Considering I already had the epox board, and I got a pair of Maxtor 80GB hdds for about $70 after pricematching (see Hot Deals forum for others as this one is now dead) I'd say it's worth it.
I was curious about W2k's software RAID as well as comparing onboard raid, as I have, to a single "hot" new hdd like the Raptor.

Now I'm wondering if I should look for onboard raid for all my future motherboards.

 

[Nebor]

I set up a RAID 0 w/ my P4C800 Deluxe's onboard Raid. I used 2 Western Digital Caviar 80 GB 8mb cache drives. HOnestly, you can't tell a difference. You could sure as hell tell a difference the first time I set it up, w/ both drives on one IDE cable... that was no good, let me tell ya, it was freakin slow as crap. So I called Asus tech support, he told me that I couldn't put them both on the same cable and expect good performance. So I say, but the manual say only one of these IDE connectors is for RAID. And the guy says, "Yeah... you'll have to use one of the SATA raid connectors, and the regular IDE Raid connector. You'll need an IDE to SATA adapter. So I hunt one of those down, which took some work, because there are so many products that allow you to plug a SATA drive onto your regular IDE interface (ALthough that's pointless, the faster transfer of the drive would be wasted....) Anyways, I found it, they only had one kind, it was 30 dollars. I got it all set up. I'm thinking, alright, this is gonna be great.... It's not that great. In fact, I would say, it was a waste of $230 bucks. After tax, those drives were $99 each.

So RAID 0 isn't that great. I should have gotten a single WD Raptor instead. Also, I don't backup my data. I don't have any data to backup. I use Yahoo! for email, so that's on a server... the only thing I'd have to reinstall in the event of a crash would be, Windows XP, my games, my drivers, Office, and Visual INterdev. Although I find office and Interdev to be a pain to back up.... Oh, I even have an extra hard drive... but I still don't backup.

 

[tweeve]

I have a Dell Dimension 8100 and when i put in my RAID card I got a HUGE boost in speed when i ran RAID 0 with my WD 120GB drives.
and and just incase i ever loose a drive all i did was back up a few documents that would be nice for school and a few programs that I have downloaded on to CD and place the CD with the rest of my Driver and OS cd's no biggie if a drive goes i get a new one and can be back up and running in less than 2 hours. without the RAID i took me close to 3 hours to get my system going again from a format.

GOT TO LOVE RAID