The Whole Point Of Raid-0 Striping Is....

[The Happy Stromboli]

What difference would it make using 320GB 8MB cache drives vs just one?

 

[Fayd]

What difference would it make using 320GB 8MB cache drives vs just one?

the whole point of raid0 striping increases the sequential data throughput. but, app loading is a random load, not a sequential load. so the benefit of data striping is near inconsequential.

as rubycon(i think) said in your other thread, if you wanna speed up your computer's access of its primary harddrive, make its primary harddrive an SSD. nothing else is gonna make that big of a difference.

besides, as someone who's lost his data to a raid0 array, i recommend you not go that route.

 

[The Happy Stromboli]

Could you buy me a Solid State drive?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Raid 0 is only really good for performance and large data sets that need to be temporary stored. Ex: if you need to temporary store a few TB of data, a raid 0 is a great solution. I would not use it for permanent storage though, unless you backup, a lot.

There was a server at work that had medical data on a raid 0. We did not even know that server existed until a HDD crapped out. Our IT manager not being technical at all, did not want any explanation, he just wanted it fix and that's the end of it. He did not give a rats ass (that was actually his wording) what raid 0 is, he just wanted the data back and the server to be back how it was.

What a nightmare that was... I wish I could find the person who made that a raid 0 so I can strangle him with a sata cable. I'll make it reach all the way around, twice.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Could you buy me a Solid State drive?

If you're tight on cash, use a 320GB for the OS and the other 320 for data backup. Do not use RAID 0 for ANYthing other than data you can live without.

Alternatively, if you have <$100 you can opt for a WD Caviar Black drive, pretty fast as a standalone disk. I use a 640 for my main Windows box, and a 750 in my Linux box. Linux is faster for daily use, it's not the drives fault though

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

I've never understood the hype with everyone who recommended Raid for a home system, and all the people who tell others to Ghost a drive as a back up. I have never heard of a drive failing and someone having a ghost copy around that is fairly current.

Meanwhile, I've got 2 sets of DVDs of all my pictures on spindles (8 and 4 gig), and all my data (pics, music, misc) is in my Dreamhost account (took me 6 months to upload).

I've had hard drives crash and I've always been able to get everything back. Right now my game machine is dead, but it's all backed up using Novaback less than a month ago.

 

[Fayd]

I've never understood the hype with everyone who recommended Raid for a home system, and all the people who tell others to Ghost a drive as a back up. I have never heard of a drive failing and someone having a ghost copy around that is fairly current.

Meanwhile, I've got 2 sets of DVDs of all my pictures on spindles (8 and 4 gig), and all my data (pics, music, misc) is in my Dreamhost account (took me 6 months to upload).

I've had hard drives crash and I've always been able to get everything back. Right now my game machine is dead, but it's all backed up using Novaback less than a month ago.

i have a raid1 array that is 1.5 TB in size, and is mosty filled.

GL backing up that to DVD's.

besides, DVD's experience rot. the data's safer on a hard disk.

the reason you've never heard of a drive failing and people having a drive around that is fairly current, is those people have experienced hdd failure before and know to make backups. thus, when it happens again, they're prepared for it, and not particularly concerned about it.

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

Blue Ray DVDs will be one answer, 50 gigs a disc. Still kinda expensive at $10 each, but the burner can be bought for $200 right now. The price will eventually come down. 8 gig DVDs used to be $10 each, now you can buy a 50 spindle at Sams for $60. Nothing is perfect, which is why I have multiple backups.

Hard drive space has always been much larger than back up methods. Most are too lazy because they've got gigs of data, and want it all done at once. The answer is to do a little at a time, especially with your pictures. My digital pictures go all the way back to 1998, and its about 75 gigs. Some people say, "I don't care if I lose it." That's sad to not care like that.

 

[MStele]

In my opinion, hard drive backup solutions are the most cost effective currently for single user systems. Its much cheaper in terms of effort and overall data continuity. They are also dynamic. For example, I have a 500GB system drive, 1TB backup internal, and a 1TB backup external. The system drive is used for normal day to day use. The 1TB internal contains system images as well as mass storage for all of the files I consider important or critical to me. The 1TB external is maintained as a duplicate to the internal 1TB, and thus provides redundancy to the backup. With this setup, I can lose either internal drive and still be fully protected, and since the external is used sparingly just to update the backup, wear and tear is kept to a minimum.

Some would consider this overkill, but given how cheap hard drives have gotten lately, it really is worth investing a couple hundred dollars in a virtually bulletproof backup solution that doesn't rely on raid support in any way. True, its a bit more hands on than some would like, but isn't data integrity the number one goal?

As for dvds and blu-ray. I think these are viable backups, but considering the cost of media and the tendency for bad burns (which sometimes aren't caught unless you do a full read test at write), i wouldn't trust anything important on them. Plus over time you have to destroy them as you make new ones, which is throwing money away. I have never felt that re-write discs were reliable enough.

 

[aricjonho]

I used Raid-0 For a long time on a spare gaming machine, where I wasn't concerned about losing any important information. My overall reaction to using it? Not a significant improvement, except when installing applications and moving my massive media folders around.

I wouldn't bother with it anymore. Any gain(minimal) isn't worth the headache, and the potential failure. If you have a ton of data that you move around a lot, I'd consider Raid-5 or Raid-6.

For a flat performance boost, SSD seems the logical choice, but I don't have any personal experience with it yet. Mine arrives on Monday.

 

[videogames101]

Don't put any data on a hard drive you want to keep forever. Simple as that.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Don't put any data on a hard drive you want to keep forever. Simple as that.

fixed. back it up to multiple hard drives. use 1 in the system and the rest as offline drives(get yourself a usb to IDE/SATA adapter). also back it up to optical media of some kind. you can never have enough backups

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

The 1TB external is maintained as a duplicate to the internal 1TB, and thus provides redundancy to the backup.

Not overkill and very smart. I'm looking to buy one of these to back up all my pictures and music.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...KT8F1&amp;v=glance
It's a 500 gig USB drive that has good reviews. And like you said up above, the drive is only used to back things up, so it's not used that often and won't have a high rate of crashing.

Older 2nd computer is basically the same thing, but they take up a lot of space in the room.

I move files between computers and a laptop all the time so they're replicated, plus DVDs (2 sets), plus my web host.

Ghosting a drive would only give you one copy of one drive, that was the problem with everyone recommending ghost. Whereas manually backing up your files to another external drive can let you back up many things from different computers. I run Novaback which makes 1 gig files of the drive including registry, like RAR. I copy these files to another computer putting them in dated folders. So on my large drive, I've got shell backups of different computers I can burn to DVD and restore.

 

[EricMartello]

I wouldn't bother with it anymore. Any gain(minimal) isn't worth the headache, and the potential failure. If you have a ton of data that you move around a lot, I'd consider Raid-5 or Raid-6.

For a flat performance boost, SSD seems the logical choice, but I don't have any personal experience with it yet. Mine arrives on Monday.

Raid-5 requires at least 3 drives and your capacity is equal to the sum of two of the 3 drives. It does improve performance with a degree of redundancy, but the parity calculations will put a higher load on the CPU unless you are using a raid card with a dedicated controller...so not really ideal for home "desktop" usage.

I would not recommend anything other than JBOD for home use, and with that you can do it in software using windows disk manager.

SSD is the best thing you can buy for alleviating the i/o bottleneck that plagues modern computers with mechanical hard drives.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Raid-5 requires at least 3 drives and your capacity is equal to the sum of two of the 3 drives. It does improve performance with a degree of redundancy, but the parity calculations will put a higher load on the CPU unless you are using a raid card with a dedicated controller...so not really ideal for home "desktop" usage.

In today's Multi-Core CPU market, the impact of the parity calculations is not as noticeable as before. I do agree that it's not necessary on most home desktops, that type of uptime is only required by hardcore home users that depend on a central server.

 

[EricMartello]

In today's Multi-Core CPU market, the impact of the parity calculations is not as noticeable as before. I do agree that it's not necessary on most home desktops, that type of uptime is only required by hardcore home users that depend on a central server.

If you compare the write speed of Raid 5 vs Raid 0 using the same disks, you'd notice the impact of those calculations despite the additional cores available today. Read speeds on raid 5 are usually equal to raid 0, but even so, the ICH10R gives dedicated raid cards a run for the money, even if the Raid 5 array is degraded.

 

[MStele]

The biggest problem I have with raid is that they are very particular. They are great when they work, but problems are much more complicated to deal with. If your controller dies, you have to find a similar one or compatibility issues might occur. If your lucky enough to have spare identical hard drives around when one crashes, then its not so bad, but if your like many home users you won't have spares, so then it becomes a chore. On top of it, raid requires more expensive hard drives that support raid features such as TLER to reduce failure. Regular hard drives are fine in smaller raid-0 arrays, but if your doing raid-5 then the failure rate for a "non raid" hard drive goes way up, especially if your degraded since the rest of the array has to work even harder. There is alot of wear and tear period.

Lets put it this way, if you have the money and know-how, then raid is a great technology to have. For everyone else, raid is just a vanity that sounds awesome but realistically has no solid benefits that can't be had for a much cheaper solution.

 

[Madwand1]

In today's Multi-Core CPU market, the impact of the parity calculations is not as noticeable as before.

RAID 5 write performance has little to do with parity calculation overhead per se, but still has a very significant performance penalty these days on most systems despite the fastest CPUs, because that's got little to do with CPU load. The issue is the pattern of drive access necessary for updating the parity calculation -- to update the parity, you must first read the drives, then do the calculation, then write back the new parity. This is two sequential read + write phases, which make the write effectively half the speed of a single-drive write, whereas with a RAID 0 system, it would be n times the speed of a single-drive write.

This penalty can be somewhat alleviated by write caching, so that instead of reading and then writing, the data is cached until there's enough to write the entire set of stripe blocks, and so no need for reading it beforehand. However, most budget RAID 5 implementations don't bother to optimize this and take the risk of cache-related problems, perhaps interpreting RAID 5 usage as an indication of precedence of integrity over performance. Intel is an exception to this when you enable its write-back cache, but there's still a performance hit and especially for random writes.

I do agree that it's not necessary on most home desktops, that type of uptime is only required by hardcore home users that depend on a central server.

Many homes have a dedicated file server these days -- it's a natural evolution, and for them, RAID 5 still makes sense by providing some redundancy cost-effectively, though of course RAID alone is not a backup, and an external backup is logically better and important even for a home server.