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My dad's about to retire his Compaq 233MHz (it's about time). Anyway we're thinking about setting up a RAID array. How much faster is RAID 0 over just a single drive? Is is twice as fast since it's writing/reading from two drives? I'm just looking for a rough idea of how much of a performance increase we will see. We are weighing performance against the extra cost of two drives.
Here's a rough sketch of our plans.
Mobo, Abit BX-133 RAID
Micro, Intel 1Gig (we know AMD is cheaper, but he would like to stick to Intel)
RAM, 256Meg's of Crucial
Video, Radeon 32Meg
Sound, some type of Creative
Hard drive(s), Maxtor ATA-100, 7200 RPM, 30Gig or so
CD-ROM,
Any ideas or suggestions?
------------------ It's never too fast!
[This message has been edited by RoundEye (edited 01-27-2001).]
Ok, if your paps is doing video editing or CAD or transfering Gigabyte files disk to disk regularly, then RAID 0 is for him. But, I doubt that so, I would say there is no point in setting up RAID on his sys. In regular apps, and even games (Q3A, UT, ETC.), the RAID will not give you a noticable increase if any.
Freckmoto
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Abit KT7 RAID
Duron 600 @ 1000mhz
OCZ Monster 2 Heatsink
256mb PC133 Infineon 222
Antec SX1030B Case
10 gig Maxtor 7200
30 gig 75GXP 7200
TNT2
SB Live Value
Crappy D-link NIC that does ok
From experience, IDE RAID 0 on that Abit MB will get you about a 70% increase in speed over non-RAID.
I would take a look at Abit's new 815e RAID mother board. The chip set is more modern and will probably give you a little more upgrade life.
Also, I disagree with freckmoto. Hard Disk performance will make a lot of difference in the performance of your system. A faster hard drive will make your system feel faster because programs will load faster and close faster.
I don't care what you do or how you use it. RAID is at least 70-75% faster than a single drive. It doesn't compare. There is no noticeable difference between SOFTWARE based (as in Win2K/NT) and HARDWARE based RAID except in large media projects, but that guy is nuts if he says there is no difference in single disk and RAID configurations except for these type of applications.
With the cost of a good RAID card (I got my IWill SideRAID66 for $17) and a couple of 15GB 7200rpm hard drives, it's crazy not to take advantage of it when building a new system.
Do it, practicality has nothing to do with it when sheer performance is being sacrificed or ignored.
Grab an IWIll SideRAID100 card for about $45 online and two 7200rpm 15GB Maxtors instead of one big 30GB. You'll be happy.
not to mention the fact that raid0 can be very unpredictable and data loss can occur. if i were you, i wouldnt worry about the hassle and longer boot time. he doesnt need a raid setup so dont do it. its more hassle than its worth. especially if you change mobos or somtheing, hes gonna have to reformat and redo his raid array. i agree that raid is fast but IMO its not worth the instability.
my 2 cents
loosbrew
70% increase in HD speed may be true, but for general windows performance and regular Apps as well as games it won't make any difference, as most things are loaded into RAM. So the 256 Crucial will definitely be sufficient. Also, the RAID on the Abit boards is crappy anyway. So if you want to do it get a promise card, not Iwill, and also, I personally think that IBM drives are slightly better than Maxtor. And I believe SsjDoh agrees w/ me on this. Again, if you aren't doing huge files transfers, vid editing/CAD, the regular 7200 RPM UDMA100 drives are fine. Even image editing isn't that incredibly hard drive intensive. Especially for the web because you want to make your pics small.
just in terms of the noticable difference in real-world terms that a much faster drive i/o system can have... alll i can say is this........
who here has ever gone from ata to ata/66 or a SCSI or boot drive? those who have know what a difference it makes when it comes to the general use of your computer.
sure, cached memory is limited to the bus's max throughput, but any time your comp accesses your hdd (which is quite often), you will see a noticable difference thats directly proportional to the speed of the respective drives.
i know its not really along the lines of the RAID issue at hand, but it is noticable. even without digital video/CAD/image manipulation. maybe not quite as profoundly, but definitely noticable.
just my $.02.....
------------------ "Those who fail to recognize the past are condemned to relive it"
Promise? Do you even use any of these things? Promise is the worst RAID card on the market. I returned mine because it just plain stunk. It's cheap..but that's about it.
And data loss? Umm, have you run RAID? Doubt it. It's no more unstable than running crap ass Win98/Me and having your system crash 1-3 times a day.
He asked a question that required knowledge from someone that has used it and that's what I offered. Opinions are one thing but plain ignorance is another.
Games do load faster when initializing maps and such, my system boots faster (Win2K striped over two sequentially reading drives...you're a fool if you're gonna tell me it's not faster), disk access is no different, read and write nearly doubles and data loss is data loss whether it's RAID or not. When a hard drive is trashed it's trashed.
Noone says **** about overclocking processors and running PCI devices way out of spec and the damage that can cause because these are the things most of you know about. You obviously know nothing of RAID other than the fact that you don't have it so he doesn't need it. Noone needs a 1.2ghz processor either. Noone needs 512MB of RAM.
Bottom line, I've never met anyone that has used RAID that didn't praise it's performance and with today's IDE drives, IDE RAID is terrific. You don't have to get an IWill card, just don't get Promise. Look at reviews. Last place in all of them. Type of HD is up to you. IBM, my opinion as well, is the best out there...they're just expensive.
[This message has been edited by ldentitycrisis (edited 01-31-2001).]
Thanks again for the replies. I've been thinking about seting up a RAID on my system (because I'm a speed freak). I used system monitor to watch my disk access, and not once has it gotten near the throughput of my benchmarks. I have a Maxtor ATA66, 7200 RPM drive and a Quantum ATA66, 7200 RPM. I benchmarked the Maxtor with Sandra and it has a throughput about 51Meg/second. Even when I burn a CD and store it on a temp file in the hard drive, my throughput never goes near 51Meg/second.
So at this point I still can't figure out where the speed advantage comes in. Is it faster because the data has two paths to travel to the drives or is it faster because it will access the disk quicker?
I also found another good link on RAID from a link at MaximumPC.RAID Info
well from what i gather mirroring is the fastet read speed. it reads faster because the hard drive is the actual speed bottleneck. reading from multiple devices on any raid system will just create a larger (faster) bottleneck so you can load things fast. at least that what i gather from the web pages ive read. i too am looking into a raid system.
i have setup plenty raid setups in my time and can say that in th past, raid0 has had some pretty bad data loss. thats not including scsi. i know that with the newer highpoint hpt370 chip, it has gotten much better, but the hassle of setting up a raid0 isnt worth it for this guy. how hard is it to slide in 512mb of ram? or whats the difference of a 900 tbird or 1.2. nothing! no extra configuring. no extra bios f*ckups! raid0 isnt very verstaile. what if he sets it all up, and finds out that one of his HDDs is fcked? then he has to redo the entire raid0 all over again not to mention reinstall the entire OS..blah blah. too much hassle for some guy who just wants to surf and do minor photoshop.
What's hard about it? Choose your drives, stripe, install drivers on OS install.
If a HDD craps out, RAID or no RAID, guess what...you're still going to be setting it back up and blahblahblah.
The only reason RAID has a bad rap about data loss is because the only documentation they have to by is high-end server use. Sure, when you have a corporate server with thousands of users accessing files and **** 24/7...hard drives are gonna die...and data is loss. Normal home use, not likely. IDE RAID hasn't been around that long. I lost my entire Win2K installation last week. It sat on one drive and I had two other drives striped. I lost nothing. Reinstalled...imported foreign disk and BAM...just like I left it. And no it wasn't set up as fault tolerant.
My opinion, if RAID wasn't better or wanted in normal usage environments it never would have taken off. When things don't catch on in the computer world...they die a quick death anymore.
He asked about it so he was interested. It's faster, no less reliable (if a hard drive dies...you lose your **** regardless) and isn't expensive.
Mirroring is in no way faster than striping unless they were setting it up wrong. The only way you could be suffering a bottleneck is if both drives you stripe are on the same controller as Win2K/NT soft-RAID allows. You don't want this. Put each individual drive on it's own controller. Mirroring will give you the same speed as normal disk access. It only reads from one drive and writes to both simultaneously.
ya i got it partly wrong. this is what i meant taken from systemlogic.net's explanation of raid.
"A good RAID controller will only read from one of the drives since the data on both are the same. While the other is used to read, the free drive can be used for other requests. This increases parallelism, which is pretty much the concept behind the performance increase of RAID."
i guess i got sorta confused what i meant was that the thing would be faster because both hd's can be used for different tasks.
Mirroring, in a sense, can retrieve data faster using the parallelism you are referring to but this is normally only present in very high-end SCSI drives that have the processing power on board to handle such requests. It can send requests to both hard drives and it will search for different data simultaneously making the access time to that data much quicker. However, since these drives are mirrored you will run into the bandwidth problem. Only one disk is being read and written to...same as a single disk.
In essence, it's more like smart disk duplexing. Fault tolerance while retaining a bootable drive as well as a slight increase in performance is what this is for. I would still prefer striping with parity in this case if three drives were available.
Way past the point in this topic now so I'm going to shut up...heh.
