RAID - Worth it?

[goobernoodles]

I'll be upgrading to a64/PCI-E soon, and I had a thought in my head for a cheap little upgrade I could do in addition.

Right now I have one 80gb WD 8mb cache IDE HD (20gb in addition).

If I were to get a second 80gb wd drive and a raid controller... would the performance increase be worth it?

 

[Zepper]

There are articles over on the Anandtech side of this site and on storagereview.com that cover the pros and cons of RAID-0 setups in detail. Capsule analysis: Little performance increase over a single high performance drive for a single-user system - while there is an increased risk of data loss.

.bh.

 

[Ronin]

I wouldn't waste my time (yes, I have striped drives, but I have plenty of redundancy). Keep em separate.

 

[Agaruvala]

My brother has RAID 0 raptor 74s and he loves it. I would say if you have high performace drives do it.

If you have regular drives, leave them apart.

I had to IBM ( yes back in the day) Deskstars in raid 0 and one failed, lost everything.

 

[gsellis]

R0's best feature is to give you big volumes with smaller drives. I have a pair of 200s being a 400 and a pair of Raptors being a 74. Got the Raptors for the speed, but R0 for the size. Zepper wins with the answer of increased risk of failure (as opposed to the erroneous 'doubles' the chance of failure )

 

[obeseotron]

You'd likely get better performance in general from 1 newer faster hard drive than 2 older one's for anything but pure sequential transfer. Maxtor's 300GB 16mb cache drives are very, very fast according to storage review, in many cases matching a raptor, and they're going for like $120. I run 2 of them in RAID0, but I also have a pair of unRAIDed Hitachi 250GB drives where I have duplicates of things like documents and music stored. It's a real pain to get windows installed on a RAID array without a floppy drive (my motherboard is missing pins on the connector, screw you MSI). Once it is installed though I do feel that it is very, very fast. Game loads are still long, but not quite as obnoxious, and I do a fair amount of video stuff and that is helped moreso than general windows usage. Still I wouldn't do something like RAID 2 older drives, you'll do much better to get a new SATA drive with NCQ and 16MB cache.

Edit:

Originally posted by: gsellis
R0's best feature is to give you big volumes with smaller drives. I have a pair of 200s being a 400 and a pair of Raptors being a 74. Got the Raptors for the speed, but R0 for the size. Zepper wins with the answer of increased risk of failure (as opposed to the erroneous 'doubles' the chance of failure )

Actually it does basically double your chances of failure. If normally 5 drives out of 100 fail the fail rate for a single drive is obviously 5% (95% chance of success) but your chances of a RAID0 array with 2 drives failing is 9.8%.

(95/100)*(94/99)=90.2% - Stats 101.

 

[Zepper]

If you need a bigger volume, you can use JaBOD which doesn't have the drawbaks of RAID-0 striping. Some of the RAID controllers (or even just HD controllers) support JaBOD (just a bunch of disks). jabod is sometimes called spanning.

.bh.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: obeseotron
You'd likely get better performance in general from 1 newer faster hard drive than 2 older one's for anything but pure sequential transfer. Maxtor's 300GB 16mb cache drives are very, very fast according to storage review, in many cases matching a raptor, and they're going for like $120. I run 2 of them in RAID0, but I also have a pair of unRAIDed Hitachi 250GB drives where I have duplicates of things like documents and music stored. It's a real pain to get windows installed on a RAID array without a floppy drive (my motherboard is missing pins on the connector, screw you MSI). Once it is installed though I do feel that it is very, very fast. Game loads are still long, but not quite as obnoxious, and I do a fair amount of video stuff and that is helped moreso than general windows usage. Still I wouldn't do something like RAID 2 older drives, you'll do much better to get a new SATA drive with NCQ and 16MB cache.

Edit:

Originally posted by: gsellis
R0's best feature is to give you big volumes with smaller drives. I have a pair of 200s being a 400 and a pair of Raptors being a 74. Got the Raptors for the speed, but R0 for the size. Zepper wins with the answer of increased risk of failure (as opposed to the erroneous 'doubles' the chance of failure )

Actually it does basically double your chances of failure. If normally 5 drives out of 100 fail the fail rate for a single drive is obviously 5% (95% chance of success) but your chances of a RAID0 array with 2 drives failing is 9.8%.

(95/100)*(94/99)=90.2% - Stats 101.

Stats 201 - MTBF with SD, add a second drive with the same MTBF and SD. So, if MTBF is 10 years a 2 standard deviations gets you to a range of 8-12 years. Either drive is more likely to fail in the 8-12 range, not at 5 years. Remember, the fact that a coin landed heads up has no effect on the chance of how the coin will fall on the next toss.

Edit: Made up the SD - Manufacturers make up the MTBF and it usually is a WAG, not based on observed data.

Edit2: MTBF was Goal Programming IIRC. That was 20 years ago in Econometrics classes... And it does not always make linear sense.

 

[TGS]

Why put your data at an increased rate of risk for little performance gain? I've been a big fan of RAID 1, since an array I had switched from 0 to 1 had a drive fail. I heard some funny noises from the tower. I turned off the power check to make sure nothing was jiggling around, and powered back up. Came up with a failure on disk 1, but my computer kept on rolling. I popped in a spare drive and bam, rebuild starts and I'm back in business (though techinically never really down, other than I'm a paranoid fellow when it comes to hardware).

RAID is worth it if, and only if:

RAID 0 ) you need the extra speed, and do not care about data loss

RAID 1, 0+1, 1+0, 3, 5, etc ) If you need extra speed, care about your data, and don't mind paying more to ensure your data will be available.

 

[ZH]

I have to say that I like my RAID 0 with 2x80G Hitachi's. It's way faster than a single disk by itself. It's almost as fast as a single 74G Raptor at $50 cheaper with twice the space.

If you're concerned about disk failure, just make sure you have a good backup process, which I highly recommend regardless of the storage type.

gsellis is correct about the probability of one drive NOT affecting the probability of the second. Adding an independent probability doesn't add to the total probability. obeseotron must've failed Stat 101. I have no idea about the rest of the stuff gsellis was saying..

If you don't have RAID built into your mboard, I'd go for the Raptor. 32bit PCI RAID controllers don't come in a variety and they're not that good anyways. But since you're going to be upgrading the mboard anyway, get one with RAID support and add a 2nd 80 WD drive for RAID 0.

 

[TGS]

It should only apply to devices not being used in tandem. Both MTBF's of each device will count against the others, as they are treated as discrete objects making a larger device. Of course the drives will not have an increased MTBF on either device, the MBTF is increased as the device count counts up due to the fact they are being used as a single entity in the system.

 

[WackyDan]

The reality is simple...

1. if you want to learn about RAID... then do it if you got the money to spare.

2. WHile Raid 0 looks real nice under benchmark... chances are none of the applications you run today will show any real/perceptable improvement - Unless of course you are running some high end apps that do a lot of caching and such. Video editing would be one example. Loading large game maps/levels may show improvement as well.

3. Not only do you have the expense of controller and extra drive, you also have the expense of having a reliable backup... Menaing another drive/external drive/remote drive/share. Losing one drive in a RAID 0 config is a hard lesson to learn if you don't have a backup strategy.

4. you'll be increasing the noise noise and heat output of your system.

 

[Kalbi]

RAID kills bugs fast.

/thread

 

[goobernoodles]

I use my computer for a lot of gaming, BF2 mainly (known for very, very long load times), and also a great deal of graphics and video work (ie. Macromedia Flash, Photoshop, Premier).

Do newer motherboards Nforce3&4 come with IDE raid? If not... I'll probably just get a raptor. But besides a crapload of mp3's and pictures... I don't really have a constant flow of stuff that I need to save. The increased performance would be nice.

Sounds like its about a 5:1 ratio of people saying its not worth it, to those saying it is.

 

[Zepper]

Most new mobos come with SATA RAID if anything at all. Add-on SATA or PATA RAID cards can be had for under $25. each so it is not expensive to play if you want. Using ECC memory is also a good idea when using RAID-0 as it gives another small edge in preventing data corruption and/or loss.

.bh.

 

[ribbon13]

RAID is something like SMP or dual monitors. Once you've worked with it, it's hard to go back. But for an old IDE 80GB , it's not really worth the expense.

 

[ZH]

I know of a few with PATA (or IDE) RAID. evga, jetway, and asus SLI mobos all support PATA and SATA RAID even tho the evga and jetway doesn't document it.

I use the evga sli mobo myself and love it! I use the SATA RAID since it has a larger bandwidth.

 

[gsellis]

I used to have this quote from Sumner in my sig. If you have to ask what it is, you don't need it. or something like that.

 

[Jiggz]

I've gone from 2 X 40 gb raid 0, single hdd with 16 mb cache, back to raid 0, back to single hdd, and now back to 2 X 80 gb 7.2K, 8Mb cache Raid 0 with a single 160 GB, 16 mb cache as a back up. So far I'm happy with the Raid 0 set up. Sure it increase data risk, but with a weekly cloning of the Raid to the 160 GB, I do have a back up plan. RAID 0 is jut addictive. Especially now that files seems to be larger and not getting smaller either. Boot up time seems to be better compare to a single identical drive

 

[Jiggz]

Double post!

 

[JEDIYoda]

I always run 2 of my harddrives in raid0 just for gaming purposes....

even a harddrive spinning at 7,800 rpm if connected in a raid0 config will spin approx....20-25% faster than if not in a raid0 config!

Yes you do have twice as good a chance of losing data......but if your smart about it you never put critical data on your gaming raid0 set up harddrives!!

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda
even a harddrive spinning at 7,800 rpm if connected in a raid0 config will spin approx....20-25% faster than if not in a raid0 config!

Not only do 7800rpm disks not exist*, the drives don't "spin faster" in RAID-0.

* Go on, find me one.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
I've gone from 2 X 40 gb raid 0, single hdd with 16 mb cache, back to raid 0, back to single hdd, and now back to 2 X 80 gb 7.2K, 8Mb cache Raid 0 with a single 160 GB, 16 mb cache as a back up. So far I'm happy with the Raid 0 set up. Sure it increase data risk, but with a weekly cloning of the Raid to the 160 GB, I do have a back up plan. RAID 0 is jut addictive. Especially now that files seems to be larger and not getting smaller either. Boot up time seems to be better compare to a single identical drive

What do you use for imaging your RAID 0 array? I've had several people ask about that, and I never did it enough to come up with specific results.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

I used 2 80GB 8MB cache 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 temporarily until I got my 3rd hard drive for RAID 5. There is a performance decrease, but I don't really notice it much since I moved from a POS celery laptop to a blazing fast overclocked Athlon 64 rig, so I'm happy Plus, the redundancy of RAID 5 means much less frequent backups. Since you just have a 40GB drive, I don't really recommend PATA RAID, since you'll probably be ditching them soon for SATA anyways. Plus, more PATA drives means a lot messier case. Just get some newer drives.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: t3h l337 n3wb
I used 2 80GB 8MB cache 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 temporarily until I got my 3rd hard drive for RAID 5. There is a performance decrease, but I don't really notice it much since I moved from a POS celery laptop to a blazing fast overclocked Athlon 64 rig, so I'm happy Plus, the redundancy of RAID 5 means much less frequent backups. Since you just have a 40GB drive, I don't really recommend PATA RAID, since you'll probably be ditching them soon for SATA anyways. Plus, more PATA drives means a lot messier case. Just get some newer drives.

I noticed a tremendous different when I went from a Promise SX6000 controller with 5 WD 120gb IDE hds to my Broadcom BC4852 with 5 250gb SATA hds. The difference was amazing. So I agree with l337 n3wb, wait to get SATA hds.