RAID 1: IDE array NOW or SATA later or not bother

[Giantwasp]

I am currently specing a new PC that I will build in a few weeks.
I have a WD 120GB 7200rpm 8MB IDE drive on my current machine that is only a few months old and I plan to use it in my new rig.

The box for the drive says it is a "limited addition", although I am not taking that too seriuosly, I am thinking about getting another one while they are still in the shops.

Would I be better to save my money and wait until I get around to buying 2 SATA drives. Are the performance benefits of SATA over IDE such that I will want to go over to SATA soon or is IDE nearly as good.

Another idea would be to start with RAID 1 with 2 IDE drives, And then at a later date get 2 SATA drives and then set up the 4 drives in a RAID 0 & RAID 1 configuration.

Could someone tell me what is the perfomance difference with RAID 1, I have read a few posts around this forum with people saying it is; better, the same, and worse. So could you back up your opinion with a link or something. Intuition tells me that the performance would be the same or worse as you would be writing twice as much data each time.

Does RAID 1 only back you up against harddrive failure as I have never had one fail on me before neither has anyone of my immediate friends. Are HardDrives more likley to fail on modern systems than they used to. Although I don't particularly want to loose my data, I don't have anything critical that I don't back up seperately so wonder if there is any point in me setting up a RAID array.

And one last point the motherboards I am looking at (socket 939) all have built in RAID controllers will these all work under linux? Because I have seen a lot of people asking for RAID controllers that will work in linux, or is that just for motherboards without RAID?

 

[bob4432]

in my opinion, i would use the drive you have and ghost to another if you want, and not mess with raid.

i have personally experience hdd failure, only once, but that was enough for me. i backup all via ghost to an entirely different machine, plus the really important stuff to dvd.

i believe the "SE" was the 8MB cache that is now the norm.

you probably will not see any difference in ide/sata unless you get one of the wd raptors 10krpm drives. basically the 7200rpm sata drives are just the ide drives with a different connector. those new raptors are expensive, so me being the cheap guy i am, would stay with ide for now, as there would be no performance gain going to a 7200rpm sata drive -> the interface is not the bottleneck, the actual hardware is.

 

[WackyDan]

Problem is whether or not you'll really benefit from having raid 1. Depends on what you use your machine for. In a linux environment it can bump significantly the performance of an app that can utilize it, in windows the results are somewhat unclear. At any rate if you choose raid and go with the raptors, then you have a better chance to see a difference.

Raid 1 will give you redundancy, but only with that controllers chipset, so as long as your controller doesn't fail or if you can get controllers with the same chipset you'll be fine with raid 1 and I believe you get increased read rates while the write rate diminishes, but somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.

Performance will depend alot on you cluster sizing as well.

 

[Giantwasp]

Sounds like there will be no benefit with SATA for me so I wil get a matching IDE drive.
When you say ghost do you mean Norton Ghost, I really like Norton software but as far as I am aware they don't make a Linux version so would be no use to me. However I expect there is a linux equivalent available. What would be the beneit to me with using this as opposed to RAID? I get the impression RAID is pretty much set up and forget

 

[Giantwasp]

Originally posted by: WackyDan
Problem is whether or not you'll really benefit from having raid 1. Depends on what you use your machine for. In a linux environment it can bump significantly the performance of an app that can utilize it, in windows the results are somewhat unclear. At any rate if you choose raid and go with the raptors, then you have a better chance to see a difference.

When you say bump does that mean bump up or bump down performance.

Computer usage:
A lot of web browsing
Open Office & email,
Gaming
Programming (mainly Java)
Editing digital pics form my camera,
Home Banking
and other general stuff

Raid 1 will give you redundancy, but only with that controllers chipset, so as long as your controller doesn't fail or if you can get controllers with the same chipset you'll be fine with raid 1 and I believe you get increased read rates while the write rate diminishes, but somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.

Performance will depend alot on you cluster sizing as well.

Bit confused by this bit. Is what your saying that if the RAID controller fails I will need to find a new one with the same chipset to recover my data. Is this something I should be concerned about?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Giantwasp
Sounds like there will be no benefit with SATA for me so I wil get a matching IDE drive.
When you say ghost do you mean Norton Ghost, I really like Norton software but as far as I am aware they don't make a Linux version so would be no use to me. However I expect there is a linux equivalent available. What would be the beneit to me with using this as opposed to RAID? I get the impression RAID is pretty much set up and forget

yes, norton ghost. i am a linux noob but use ghost via the bootdisk to make an image to a xp pro machine. i would definately say raid is setup and forget and going with raid 1 will give you redundancy like earlier posted.

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: Giantwasp

Originally posted by: WackyDan
Problem is whether or not you'll really benefit from having raid 1. Depends on what you use your machine for. In a linux environment it can bump significantly the performance of an app that can utilize it, in windows the results are somewhat unclear. At any rate if you choose raid and go with the raptors, then you have a better chance to see a difference.

When you say bump does that mean bump up or bump down performance.

Computer usage:
A lot of web browsing
Open Office & email,
Gaming
Programming (mainly Java)
Editing digital pics form my camera,
Home Banking
and other general stuff

Raid 1 will give you redundancy, but only with that controllers chipset, so as long as your controller doesn't fail or if you can get controllers with the same chipset you'll be fine with raid 1 and I believe you get increased read rates while the write rate diminishes, but somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.

Performance will depend alot on you cluster sizing as well.

Bit confused by this bit. Is what your saying that if the RAID controller fails I will need to find a new one with the same chipset to recover my data. Is this something I should be concerned about?

I meant bump up. For your use, I don't see where you'll see any real benefit to having raid. Games might load a second faster but other than that you'd be wasting money. If you said you were going to be editing video, then I'd say go for it.

If your onboard controller or PCI installer fails, you will not be able to access the second drive and rebuild the array unless you a) get the same motherboard or MOBO with same raid chipset b) get a new controller card with same chipset or exact same controller card.

Results will vary. Sometimes you will need the exact same card/board, other times as long as the chipset is the same you'll be able to rebuild the array. Sometimes you can cross from the Mobo to a PCI controller with the same chipset.

Ok... That sounds scary, and the reality controllers are fairly reliable and in my experience generally not prone to failure. But it can happen, and has happened.

So it's still important to have a backup regardless of having raid 1. What raid 1 will get you is easier recovery.