What is the best ide raid 0 cntroller?

[stevens]

Is it better to have onboard or a pci raid controller? What is the best controller? What is the best brand? Is it better to have software or hardware raid for raid 0?

 

[tlezer]

Check out AT's Review of PCI/software RAID vs Hardware controllers. Help me understand quite a bit regarding pros and cons of different RAID types and stripe sizes. Pretty thorough.

tjl out

 

[Armitage]

3ware Escalade if you can find them.

They are substantially faster then anything else out there.

Unfortunately, 3ware decided to get out of the IDE RAID market recently, but you can probably still find some.

Other then that, check out storagereview.com. They have the best reviews on the subject. I think adaptec also had a hardware based controller that did pretty well.

 

[Ludacris]

Why spend an extra $40 - $60 on a motherboard with integrated RAID or an add-in card that will increase your load times by 3-4 seconds? Not very economical. Give me stability, decent speed, and a cheap price any day of the week.

Sounds like some of these guys just like to throw away money just to boast about BENCHMARK scores. Let's get serious here.

 

[stevens]

Ludacris: I think that you get faster boot times.

 

[Armitage]

<< Why spend an extra $40 - $60 on a motherboard with integrated RAID or an add-in card that will increase your load times by 3-4 seconds? Not very economical. Give me stability, decent speed, and a cheap price any day of the week.

Sounds like some of these guys just like to throw away money just to boast about BENCHMARK scores. Let's get serious here. >>



I run my 3ware in RAID 1 and get almost double the single drive read performance, I definitely notice it. 3 or 4 seconds over and over again adds up, and it's just nice to use. More responsive, etc. Plus I have the security of a live backup in case of drive failure. That's the primary reason I went for IDE RAID, I would never run RAID 0.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

<< Why spend an extra $40 - $60 on a motherboard with integrated RAID or an add-in card that will increase your load times by 3-4 seconds? Not very economical. Give me stability, decent speed, and a cheap price any day of the week.

Sounds like some of these guys just like to throw away money just to boast about BENCHMARK scores. Let's get serious here. >>

Actually Ludacris when your working with big files like video editing, a raid array can be a huge help.

 

[QuestionsandAnsweres]

ergeorge
I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW HOW U GET 2x the read speed on a raid 1. Cause raid 1 would be about the same speed as one drive. RAID 0 tho would increase performance 😛

 

[tazdevl]

LOL... he probably doesn't know what RAID is. If anything RAID 1 is slightly slower than a single drive. If 3ware got those kinds of results... it would be the most popular controller in the market and they wouldn't stop making them.

Also... not the best thing to buy a controller who's support could be questionable.

 

[rommel]

3ware...its mo money but its really fast....this card i think only works with 2k and xp and linux ...any multitasking os...dont think 9x is supported

 

[Armitage]

<< ergeorge
I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW HOW U GET 2x the read speed on a raid 1. Cause raid 1 would be about the same speed as one drive. RAID 0 tho would increase performance 😛 >>

(from questionsandanswers)

If you have a good RAID controller, it splits up the reads over the available drives. So it might read half of the data from drive 1 and the other half from drive 2, in parallel. The software based controllers don't do very well at this, but the 3ware card scales almost linearly in reading with the number drives in a RAID 1 array. But don't listen to me, look at the benchmarks yourself:

From the database @ storagereview.com

IOMeter - File Server Access Pattern - Load = Moderate *

IOMeter Tests
IO/sec
MB/sec
Response Time
CPU Util.
IO/CPU%

3Ware Escalade 6400, 1 Drive
84.57
0.91
756.63 ms
0.91 %
92.93

3Ware Escalade 6400, RAID 1, 2 Drives
135.37
1.47
472.43 ms
1.51 %
89.65

You're not going to see a the full impact of the read speed-up because the benchmark is more complicated then a simple sequential read. Even so, the RAID 1 throughput is about 62% faster then the single drive metric, and the seek time is about 38% better.

I ran some benchmarks when I was setting up my system. One of my models reads about a few MB of data out of a large (about 30MB file) when it starts up. This portion of the program completed about 90% faster on RAID 1 then on a single disk. The RAID 0 mark was about 95% faster then single disk.



<< LOL... he probably doesn't know what RAID is. If anything RAID 1 is slightly slower than a single drive. >>

(from tazdev1)

Are you sure you know what RAID is? The fact that RAID 1 can speed up read access is pretty common knowledge. It will be about the same, to slightly slower then single disk for write access.



<< If 3ware got those kinds of results... it would be the most popular controller in the market and they wouldn't stop making them. >>

(from tazdev1)

Check out the database @ storagereview. They have very extensive result sets for this stuff. And yes, I have a hard time believing they weren't the most popular controllers out there. In addition to the performance, the setup & tools for their product were excellent. I don't know about the tech support, because I've never had any trouble with mine.

There marketing sucks for one thing though. Almost nobody has heard of them, even Anandtech ignored 3ware in their IDE raid shootout.