Raid Setups

[Id studios]

Team,

Can someone please educate me or anyone else who wants to know on the the whole RAID system. I have some understanding of it and the way it works. Can you guys please try to answer some of the questions i have. I have tried doing some research on it but i wouldnt mind hearing it from you guys.

Im will be doing a full Reformat soon, and would maybe consider a raid setup depending on the outcome of this post.

What types of raid setups are there?
What are the Pros and Cons of Raid?
What i incorperate raid on a system build for gaming?

Thanks

 

[deveraux]

Well, depends what you want. I presume you're going to use the RAID available on your mobo, which means you are limited to RAID 0/1/10

RAID 0:
Well, probably the best for gaming, although AT did a review of 2 Raptors in RAID 0 which didn't perform significantly faster than a single Raptor. But basically, RAID 0 is when you have to drives configured and when you write data, the RAID controller writes to both drives meaning each drive only writes half of the data hence theoretically doubling performance. But of course, it doesn't double performance in real world. Most benchmarks tend to show around a 20-25% increase depending on what you do but random read/writes tend to improve more than sequential read/writes. However, if any of the drives fail, you lose the entire array, hence destroying all data and recovery is expensive. This means that you are effectively halving your MTBF but for current drives with 3-5 yrs of warranty, it usually doesn't matter since they last so long anyway.

RAID 1:
Best for permanent backup. When you write data, the same data gets written to both drives thus creating a perfect backup. Write performance is theoretically the same but read performance goes up as both drives are used to read different pieces of data. However, if you link say 2 160 GB HDDs, you only get 160 GB from the array since the other drive is being used as a permanent back hence you pay for RAID 1 in terms of HDD space.

RAID 10:
This is basically a combination of the two above. This requires a minimum of 4 HDDs to work. Two of the drives will be in RAID 1 and those two will be in RAID 0 with the other two drives. Hence, you would theoretically get the performance of RAID 0 as well as the redundancy of RAID 1. Read performance however goes through the roof as all for drives are used for reading. But as for RAID 1, you lose half of your disk space so that's the con.

Another note, if I am correct, mobo RAID controllers tend to use the CPU to perform the RAID, which although for these RAID levels present very little load on the CPU, it still does use the CPU hence might not help with gaming all that much (IMHO). If you are really considering RAID, quite a few people on this board have sworn by RAID 5 which will require a dedicated RAID controller which is not on the mobo. Try googling RAID, you would get an even better explanation than the one I have provided here.

 

[tranceport]

http://www.google.com

 

[Id studios]

Deveraux,

Thanks for taking the time to explain to me and others regarding the raid options....at this point in time, raid 0 looks doable..

Whereas Tranceport on the other hand was not much help and i guess thats the only way he/she increases his/her post status. You tend to get these people on one forum or another - but we are used to ppl like this nowadays...
:roll:

 

[NumbaJuan]

Do a search of the forums. This topic has been discussed in length & there is a lot of good info floating around. If you are considering going the raid-0 route (which IMHO is not worth it), then have a good backup routine in place, cuz if one or the other drives fail you loose everything! Just my 2 cents.

 

[Juno]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

 

[akira34]

You can get the best of both worlds with RAID 0+1 or RAID 5. Just about any mobo with onboard RAID (worth a damn) will support RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1... Some even do RAID 5, but most often you get that from a good controller card.

If you don't have critical data, just use RAID 0, otherwise use 0+1 or 5.

Personally, I don't really have any backup routines at this time. Mostly because I don't want to drop the money needed to do all of my storage at one time. I do 'backup' to an external drive critical items, or burn cd/dvd's of it. Otherwise, I just make sure it's something I can easily recreate or do again.

Then again, I have yet to have any of my Seagate or Western Digital hard drives fail. Go with QUALITY drives (over cheap) and the chance of failure is greatly reduced.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Well, I am running dual 36 GB raptors in RAID 0 in my older comp, and dual 74GB raptors in this one (both 10k rpm.) I trust western digital, and they seem to trust these drive (5 yr warranties) I wish I could do RAID 0+1, but not yet.

RAID 0 effects don't really show up in game load times according to magazines like Maximum PC. I do see a HUGH performance jump in everyday browsing and such, so I don't know...

 

[tranceport]

Originally posted by: Id studios
Deveraux,

Thanks for taking the time to explain to me and others regarding the raid options....at this point in time, raid 0 looks doable..

Whereas Tranceport on the other hand was not much help and i guess thats the only way he/she increases his/her post status. You tend to get these people on one forum or another - but we are used to ppl like this nowadays...
:roll:

When you ask questions like and I quote.

What types of raid setups are there?
What are the Pros and Cons of Raid?
What i incorperate raid on a system build for gaming?

It is obvious that you haven't searched at all. If you had some meaningful questions I would have responded with a meaningful answer.

Dieinafire.

 

[Jeff7]

What are the different RAID levels and what are they used for?

 

[Tarrant64]

I have 2 36gb raptors and my system overall performance is much faster than it was. Some load times went down in some things and copy huge files became less of a hassle as well. I'm used to moving huge audio/video files around and it has gotten much better since i got the raid.

Also, performance can also change depending on how you setup your stripe sizes on your raid array. I think i have mine at 64 or 128. I'm not sure. But if anyone knows a good place where you can find out which stripe size is the best, please post it. I just changed it every once in awhile when I reformatted my computer to see which ones work out best.

Other than that, don't worry about everyone who says RAID isn't worth it blah blah blah. I see that all the time and I went ahead and did it, and I wouldn't go back. You may want to get a backup drive though. I currently use a 80gb for storage and backups(buying a 160 or 200gb here pretty soon cause the 80gb just isn't going to cut it.)

 

[Id studios]

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[sdgserv]

deveraux..I have question for you. I am doing projects on one HD and when I have completed the project I send it to another HD. The projects are as small as 200mb up to 15 gig. Would a Raid help or speed up the transfer?
Thanks

 

[Tarrant64]

Depends on the number of hard drives. If you only have 2 hard drives, the'll both be seen as one(if i'm correct), so you wouldn't be able to move it from one to another. if you had 3 hard drives, 2 in RAID and one for your storage or whatever, I would think so.

 

[akira34]

Your transfer speeds will only be as fast as the slowest device being accessed. If you're feeding from a drive that's ATA100/133 to a SATA RAID, you won't be able to feed the RAID as fast as it wants to go. On the other hand, if you have two RAID 0 arrays, then, yes the transfer will be much faster than just a pair of drives (one to the other).

 

[bulldawg1979]

I'm getting ready to Raid 0 two WD 74G Raptors and use 120G WD for storage. Did you ever get a link to any info on stripe size? I hope to do some video editing. Thanks for any feedback.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Hey....I have an old P4 system with 2 WD36 36GB Raptors in RAID 0, and my A64 FX-53 has WD74s in RAID 0....aside from the fact they dont register ar 148GB (138...) I love em.

FOr stripe size....well, I'll explain this to you. The stripe size determines how files will be split up. If you have a 32K stripe size, and a 128K file, it'll be split up 4 times...however....if you have a 16k file....it wont be split up at all....an odd file that cant be divided into 32 wont have anything done to it..even if it is biger than 32k(maybe thats wrong...I cant belive it, but I've read it....prob just divide it evenly...so don't trust it, lol)

I always use 32K, but I used to try 16K, I dunno....no real diff. So do what you want....just sit in the middle I'd say (64,32 prob)

Then, for fun, run HD tach some simpli software....I found my two WD74s had a peak speed of 235 mb/s, and avg of 130mb/s-145mb/s (it changes sometimes) So, needless to say, mine, and yours two, and almost pushing the SATA150 limit....plus they outscore SCSI drives (15K RPM SCSI drives!!!!)

Well, have fun, I hope I was able to help.