To RAID or not to RAID that is the question?

[MrWhiteUK]

Is it worth the $$$ to add an additional GXP60 to my setup for RAID 0.

Will the performance increase be worth it?

Main uses:

Audio Editing/Listening
VB/C++ Coding
Vector/3D Artwork
Word Processing
Surfing

1 Game (Monkey Island 4 🙂)


I can get a GXP60 here in the UK for about £120 ($180??)


Whadya Reckon?


btw, Is the onboard Promise RAID controller on my MOBO considered Hardware/Software RAID?

Thanks

 

[wasnlos]

Hm, i would recommend running SISANDRA, then you will see comparisons, though i don't know wether their RAID-numbers or -columns are hardware- or software-raid.

the PROMISE-conroller onboard is soft-raid for sure.

 

[SCSIRAID]

Whether it would be worth it or not depends on what makes you happy.... RAID 0 will make your benchmarks look real good but probably make little 'real' improvement in your system. It will add to your probability of failure in that the loss of 1 drive costs you all your data. For ME... if I really wanted to go RAID... I would go RAID 1 and add reduncancy to protect my data. But thats me.

The IDE RAIDs you find on MB's and most of the PCI cards are pure software RAID. Not that that is necessarily bad.... but I do HW RAID for a living and thus am just a little bit biased 😀

 

[SeTeS]

If you're working with large files a lot, it will help. Boot times are a bit better under win2k as well. Load times are quicker.. seek times are slower.

Raid 1 as a data protection scheme is quite handy, but it's almost -too good- of a backup scheme... by this I mean that EVERYTHING you do on the main drive is instantly applied to the mirror drive -- e.g. accidentally deleting important files.. 🙂

So, if you are gonna go w/ Raid 1 as a backup solution, just be sure to either have MORE THAN ONE hot swappable mirror drive available, or backup regularly to some other medium.