Why RAID on a home desktop box?

[WildHorse]

So may people are talking about their RAID arrays on their PCs.

Just hassles & expense for what gain? Maybe a few milliseconds faster read/write...why bother? Caches are big enough now that the tiny extra RAID speed isn't worth it.

At home, I'd rather use my extra disks for backup than put them into a RAID array.

Your thoughts?

 

[Nothinman]

RAID0 is not really a great idea because it does complicate things for only a minor performance gain. But redundant RAID levels like 1, 5, 6, etc aren't bad ideas because hard drives are unreliable, they die all the time.

 

[Lorne]

Hmmm, I found it easyer to install a raid setup faster and easyer then actually installing windows and the speed difference was considerably faster.
Ive also had the same life expectency as if I was using a single drive and just do my backups as you would a single drive.

You should back your low utilized data to DVD as storing it on another possible failing HD isnt prudent, Setting up a raid 1 would only be cost worthy if you absolutly have to have you stored data on hand for access and dont need any speed improvment, Raids 5 and 6 are great but cost is much higher as the need for 3+ HD's, Moderate powersupply and case cooling, You do get both speed and security.

BTW, raid's actually increase access times to improve data throughput.
Heres a visual axample you can compare with, With my raid 0 now and as soon asthe last line of my BIOS posting shows I get a 1-3 sec black screen then my XP desktop, With a single it was the 2-5 seconds and then that introduction screen with the line going across for 25-50 seconds before the desktop would show up and a few more seconds to resolve all the auto run programs.
Now imagine your games and utilities running the same way.


Oh how I miss my SCSI raid 0, So smooth and clean, But thats a different story.

 

[Nothinman]

Setting up a raid 1 would only be cost worthy if you absolutly have to have you stored data on hand for access and dont need any speed improvment,

Actually if your RAID software is smart RAID1 will give a read speed increase since it can balance the reads across drives. Writes will still be slower though.

 

[sutahz]

Yeah RAID0 is useless for almost all home users.

 

[imported_wired247]

Originally posted by: scott
So may people are talking about their RAID arrays on their PCs.

Just hassles & expense for what gain? Maybe a few milliseconds faster read/write...why bother? Caches are big enough now that the tiny extra RAID speed isn't worth it.

At home, I'd rather use my extra disks for backup than put them into a RAID array.

Your thoughts?

your logic flows differently than mine.

I wanted redundancy, so that a single HD failure would not bother me, and I did not want to sacrifice speed. Therefore, RAID-1 was not for me (slow), so I went with RAID-5.

In order to do RAID-5 properly you need a good controller.

simple as that.

IMHO money well spent, I'd buy again.

Plus, it's much much faster than a single drive, both reading AND writing, while sacrificing only about 1ms latency.

 

[Nothinman]

Therefore, RAID-1 was not for me (slow), so I went with RAID-5.

Generally RAID5 is slower than RAID5 because of the parity calculations that RAID1 doesn't have to do.

 

[Lorne]

Nothinman, Ill assume that is a typo, But RAID 5 is albiet slower then RAID 0 but RAID 5 is faster then RAID 1, Smart RAID 1 is uncommon and in most cases doesnt work on most controllers that claim to have it.

Sutahz, You are correct about most home users not using Raid, But most home users dont use this website, Its mainly computer Enthusiest of sort.

If your just a gamer then dont waste your time, If your a gamer that wants little upper hand raid might be for you, If you want to impress your friends a little more with your older/slower machine a raid might be for you.
If your an OC'r, I suggest forgoing the raid untill your 100% stable.

RAID's make a difference and can make a great increase in speed or data protection, I do know that a bad setup along with faulty hardware can detour expectation and future setups.
I have set raid's up for a long time now and have made great performances out of even problimatic chipsets (VIA, cough), A set or few old used HD's with default settings.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have a RAID 0 and 5 array on a Areca ARC-1220 RAID controller. I love being able to pull the drives, reformat, load the RAID drivers, and have all my data again. The performance isn't bad, but I could care less about the performance. I love the convenience. For the most part, I could see why people should stay away from RAID, but that isn't to say it has it's uses. RAID on a controller > RAID on mobo.

EDIT: I am always amazing how many people say RAID is evil, yet OC the hell out of their processors, mobo, & RAM while getting the bare minimum in PSUs. But whatever floats your boat.

 

[imported_wired247]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Therefore, RAID-1 was not for me (slow), so I went with RAID-5.

Generally RAID5 is slower than RAID5 because of the parity calculations that RAID1 doesn't have to do.

Maybe in general this is true if you were comparing the same number of drives. But this RAID5 array is much much faster than a pair of drives in RAID1 (And I don't see why I'd want to have more than 2 drives in RAID1)

 

[markreflex]

it not useless on a home system raid 0 is alot faster !!!!!!

 

[Nothinman]

it not useless on a home system raid 0 is alot faster !!!!!!

OMG!!! You've totally convinced me!!!!

 

[KBTuning]

raid0 used to be where it was at but i dont think its really worth it anymore...

i noticed an increase in speed for everything when i went from a single 160gb hd to two of them in raid about 3 years ago... if your doing stuff like photoshop its still better to just have your scratchfile on a seperate hard disk... so im going to just leave my new setup with seperate drives.... single 300gb 16mb 7200rpm and two 160gb 8mb 7200rpm...

 

[WildHorse]

I like to dedicate an entire HDD to serve as an Acronis Secure Zone and backup to it frequently. It's nice because it never "fills up," it comes to a point where new files overwrite ancient ones, plus it deleted any deleted files from the archive.

The initial backup takes a long time, hours, but then subsequent incremental backups are fast, 10 to 15 minutes.

A RAID array doesn't give you a backup, it just mirrors any errors. So the point as I understand it is speed. But the 16MB HDD cache already helps the speed, so less benefit from RAID it seems to me. At least, any tiny speed enhancement isn't worth the RAID controller issues, and then you still need a backup of the striped RAID data somewhere.

So it seems to me the RAID configurations belong on big servers, but not on a home computer.