RAAAAAAAID!!!!!

[FiveseveN]

I am looking into setting up a Raid on the system I am building. Since Raid 0 is obviously the fastest I am considering it, although its not the safest.

If I set up 2-4 SATA2 drives in the case on Raid 0 for the apps, OS and what not but use the External drives I have (which have stuff on them I dont want to loose) as non Raid drives to store the stuff I want to keep will that be a good set up for speed and saftey? I could also put the external drives on my other PC and access them thru LAN.

Or what other Raid options are good for gaming and speed but also safe.......ie Raid 0+1?

I have the external drives partitioned into 4 partitions each for a total of 20 partitions, so I am not sure if all those partitions would slow down my computer alot?

Just not up to speed on drive management.

Thanks in advance,

FiveseveN

 

[FiveseveN]

Anyone?

 

[imported_Tick]

Ahem.... ALAAAAAAAARRMM!

Now that that's out of the way, RAID 0 is just stupid. Really. Unless it's a server, you will see little benefit, and the likelyhood of drive failure is just insane. It's far better an idea to use individual drives, or if you really must have RAID, RAID 5. 0+1 is ok, but you only get 50% storage efficiency.

 

[One43637]

kills bugs dead?

 

[Agent11]

If you want speed go scsi.. but you had better have some $$$$$

scsi thread

 

[lolgloin]

Get a 10,000 RPM and you'll be set, but as Agent11 mentioned with the SCSI they are a little more expensive. (I have seen the ~40GB 10K RPM drives for around $100 as of late)

 

[Bobthelost]

The fastest single drive solution for gaming is a SCSI 147Gb Fugitsu Mau i belive. Followed by several other 147gb 15k SCSI drives, and the Raptor 150. All SCSI drives of less than 147gb capacity i've seen (ie 74gb or 36gb) perform worse than the raptor 150. I await anyone, (please educate me if i'm wrong) who has any stats to show that a 36gb drive, SCSI/SATA/Other can keep up with a Raptor 150 for gaming.

Fiveseven, i have no idea what on earth you're doing with your hard drives and to be harsh but fair, neither do you by the looks of things.

If you want speed then get yourself a Raptor or SCSI setup, forget the RAID, it just doesn't work for gaming. If it's a choice between 2X drive A that are each slower than Drive B then generally then drive B is best. Of course if you take 2x drive B in RAID 0 then you're laughing as it does provide some improvement.

I have no idea what on earth you think you're doing with your external drives, 20 partitions? Why on earth have you done that?

 

[l Xes l]

no

 

[FiveseveN]

Well I suppose I should have been a little more detailed......sorry bob.

I do video editing and need the raid mostly for that, but I have also read many places about the benefits of doing Raid 0. I also do photo editing and sound mixing. I was thinking if I did a raid 0 on 2 250G drives for the work I am doing then save back up copies to the 1.5TB of externals I have. I have all of the work I dont want to loose on the externals plus hard copy back ups.

I just wanted to add the gaming into the system. with the proper raid. I dont know much about raid so I asked. I do not desire a SCSI system, personal preference.

Thanks to all,

FiveseveN

 

[MegaWorks]

Originally posted by: Tick
Ahem.... ALAAAAAAAARRMM!

LOL! I don't get it why you wrote RAAAAAAAAAAID!! lol!

 

[Bobthelost]

Ah, yes for you RAID is a good plan. Video editing is one of the times RAID is really worth going for. However it's a compromise on the gaming, it'll still be good but not as good as a Raptor 150 as a boot disc and a RAID 0 for the video files (with regular backups to the external drives).

20 partitions makes more sense for 1.5Tb but i'd probably go for less, seems to make life too complicated to me.

 

[FiveseveN]

the reason for RAAAAAAAID is from the old raid comercials where the little bug screams RAAAAAAAID.

Anyway, thanks again Bob.

Yes I know 20 partitions is nuts, and I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. I am going to fix that however.

One last question for you. Do you think the Hitachi T7K250 would make a good boot disk and using 2 more T7K250s for the Raid 0? I know 250 is overkill for a boot disk but I havent checked the Raptor prices but I can imagine its more money. Correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks again,

FiveseveN

 

[Bobthelost]

The T7K250 was a top notch drive when it was released, but the WD2500KD is better (faster). If they do a 250YR version then i'd go for that as it's designed for RAID use. (Although TLER won't help you much there thinking about it)

The Raptor 150 will set you back $300 or around £220. 150 Gig of blazing speed but very uneconomical. Perhaps you could go for 2xWD4000KD instead? They are pretty much the fastest 7200 RPM drives around and almost as fast as a Raptor 74. But you'd need another disc to stream to/from then... hrm.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: FiveseveN
I do video editing and need the raid mostly for that, but I have also read many places about the benefits of doing Raid 0.

Actually, video editing (using legitimate NLE, not just ripping DVDs like some people seem to like to call video editing) is just about the only thing that you'll get a big benefit from RAID 0 with. Otherwise it's pretty pointless. I guess Bob already said that. Listen to Bob, then.

So, it's actually important to look at the max transfer rate (transfer rate is the benefit you get from RAID 0):

Atlas 15K (15,000 RPM SCSI) = 97.4 MB/s
Raptor 150 (10,000 RPM SATA) = 88.3 MB/s
Cheetah 10K.7 (10,000 RPM SCSI) = 76.5 MB/s
Barracuda 7200.9 (7200 RPM SATA -- 160GB model) = 72.7 MB/s
Raptor 74 (10,00 RPM SATA) = 71.8 MB/s
Barracuda 7200.9 (7200 RPM SATA -- 250GB model) = 67.8 MB/s
Hitachi 7K250 (7200 RPM SATA) = 65.9 MB/s
Barracuda 7200.9 (7200 RPM SATA -- 500GB model) = 62.0 MB/s
WD2500KS (7200 RPM SATA) = 61.3 MB/s

Even though the Hitachi and WD2500KS are at the bottom of the list, they're the best performing overall 7200 RPM drives, with WD2500KS being slightly better.

I mean, the WD2500KS is so much faster than the Barracuda in overall benchmark scores, I don't think I'd worry about the fact that it's only 61.3 MB/s transfer. Two WD2500KS's in RAID0 would probably be as good as two Barracuda 7200.9's in video editing, and they would definitely be faster in everything else. And everybody gets exciting about having a 16MB cache on their hard drive. But still, I'd poke around StorageReview and look at the performance for different drives.

In the end, I think by far the best bang for the buck in hard drives right now is the WD2500KS for $103.90 delivered:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101220-12

I have a Hitachi 7K250, and the drive is plenty fast. It got a lot of bad sectors on it, and I'm not one of those people who's going to start ranting how much Hitachi sucks just because of a couple bad experiences, but Hitachi customer service is terrible. They just plain would not let me RMA the drive with bad sectors. They wanted me to download an application to test and format the drive. The application will either (1) format the drive, marking out bad sectors and tell you the drive is fine, or (2) tell you that the drive was damaged from shock and your warranty is void. Maxtor did the same thing to me. They used to have the best return policy, but changed it completely. I've been sticking to Seagate and WD lately. I'd prefer Seagate, but WD drives are simply faster and cheaper.

 

[ribbon13]

Excuse me Tostada, but I think you forgot the WD4000 which was designed from the ground up to be in a RAID. Though for RAID0 I'd use the WD4000KD, it would be best to get at least 3 drives and run a RAID5 of WD4000YRs. And if you have a dual-core CPU you can even cheap out with Softraid with minimal impact on performance.

 

[Czar]

if you want speed, buy alot of ram, like 8 gb worth, use 4gb for windwos and apps... use 4gb as a ramdisk for swap files