Help me with RAID

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Ok, I know what RAID is, but have never really looked into it.

What are the different RAID levels, and what gives me the biggest bang?

The set-up I'm planning on is:
MB: MSI K8T NEO FIS2R
Proc: AMD 64 3400
Ram: 2 Gig 2700 DDR 2.5 cas (Yes, I know I need MUCH better RAM)
HD: 2 - 200 Gig WD 8mg Buffer (not complaining, they were given to me)
Vid: GeForce 5600 Ultra

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:43:37 Post Subject:

What do you want? Speed or Redundancy?

With two hard drives (I assume its just the two listed), you can either do RAID 0 or RAID 1.

RAID 0 is for speed... Data is written to both drives sequentially in small blocks, but as if it were one drive, so it can do it much faster. Full drive capacity is still available. Great for reading/writing alot of big files, and perhaps less so for demanding games. But, if 1 drive fails... all data is lost!

RAID 1 is for redundancy... All data is written to both drives at the same time. Drive capacity is cut in half, since both drives are now identical. If one drive fails, the system will continue running on the good drive... A replacement can then be added to the array, and it will be rebuilt to be identical to the other. What I use on my two main machines now (with plans for RAID 0+1).

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Well that computer is the one that only has a 40 gig 5400rpm drive in there now, and redundancy isn't a problem, as it's mainly a game rig. Don't have RAID as an option on my work machine (the 2600 Barton), at least I don't think it is, will have to verify that to be sure...

Speed is probably the biggest desire, but then again, not really sure, as all the games I play working great as it is on the 5400rpm drive Smile

The games I play are MMORPG's (ie Everquest, Asheron's Call, City of Heroes, and World of Warcraft), and occassionally Diablo 2 style games but not often.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 10:51:47 Post Subject:

What BB said.... LOL

Speed or Redundancy is all RAID is really for (well there is JOBD option that makes all the HDD's "Just One Big Disk".... but that's a waste unless you have different size/speed drives).

I have been running RAID 0 for about the last 2 yrs, never had a problem (knocks on wood). I have just got 2 160GB SATA drivers and a new controller, and I haven't decided if I'm going to run RAID 0 or RAID 1 on it. I will PROBABLY run RAID 0 because I want the speed. Any of my important stuff I back up to another HDD & a DVD anyways.

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Yea, that's why redundancy isn't an issue at least on this system. I back all my stuff up to DVD, my Archos player, or my web-site.

So probably go Raid 0 just for the speed Smile

Any idea what kind of speed boost I could see? Will it be really noticable?

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:48:10 Post Subject:

Yes... not sure what you'll actually notice in everyday apps, but benchmarks will about double the speed of the single drive benchmark...

In Sandra, my 40 GB drives do 26500 kB/s as a standard IDE device, and when I used RAID 0, they did 52625 kB/s on my AMD system and 64740 kB/s on my P4 system.

Spire · Posted: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 23:13:42 Post Subject:

Im still debating the entire RAID 0 is better thing...

First of all, yes benchmarks are real good, but real life doesn't seem to show the increase. I have 2 x 37 gig Raptors in a RAID 0 array and although they scream, they scream all by themselves too. I'm not sure the risk of 2 x the failure rate is worth anything.

Then I ran across this from Anandtech...

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101&p=1

I have benches of all kinds of my array setups, 0 and 1. I can post the pics if any interest. I also compared onboard SIL controller to a PCI SATA RAID card.

Enforcer · Posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:16:20 Post Subject:

That anandtech article was great, except that they didn't try out any pro solutions to see if there was a performance increase there or also with some regular drives, like slower drives increasing when doubled up.

I thought about RAID a bunch of times, but the truth turned out that I wanted the space there and multiple disks worked as opposed to just RAID 0

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

I'm not sold on Raid 0 either, not sure if the speed increase would really give me that big of a "bonus" but might do that since I'd still have the whole 400gig's available Smile