Raid 0

[valaris]

Hey I was looking to get some opinions on raiding as I have zero experience doing it. I was looking to grab 2 new drives for my new core i7 comp, a velociraptor for the OS and some ~1TB hd for storage. I wanted to put these into RAID 0 for increased throughput and a speed increase but I am reading conflicting reports on the net that this actually may not be fastest, that I should not RAID it.

Anybody have any experience on what I can do to achieve optimal speed?

IE I guess my main question is will 2 different hard drive speeds actually lower my speed if they are in raid 0 versus just having seperate drives.

P.S. I mostly use this rig for gaming etc...

Cheers.

[brewbuck]

Gaming shouldn't require huge disk throughput. Sounds like you need storage. I'd just use the two drives as separate volumes. At least then a drive failure of one drive doesn't destroy both filesystems.

[valaris]

Ya that's the conclusion that I'm coming to as well. It turns out from further reading that I would need 2 identical drives for raid 0 anyways, so I couldn't raid a velociraptor and some TB drive.

[Mario F.]

Reminds me of a "debate" I was having with a colleague some days ago. I was trying to convince him that spending money on a SD hard drive to host the windows operating system wasn't going to improve his i7 12GB RAM computer performance. Not in a way that he would notice. And by the time software requirements made his setup slow, it still wasn't the SD HD that would save the day.

His argument, and that was final, was "every bit counts!".
I hate idiots. Especially idiots with money.

[cpjust]

Here's a speed comparison of 3 HD's in RAID 0, 1, 5, and a single drive by itself.
Seagate Disk & RAID solutions - Comparison of RAID 0, 1 & 5

Yes, you need all the drives in your RAID to be identical.
If you do go that route and want to use RAID 0 for your OS, you can partition your RAID volumes to use half the disks in RAID 0 and the other half in RAID 1 (or 5 if you've got 3 HD's), but you should make sure you make backups of your RAID 0 volume in case a drive dies.

[cyberfish]

Linux software RAID allows RAIDing of any partitions. Not many people play games on Linux, though :P.

[valaris]

Ya, this rig is mostly setup to play the latest and greatest games. I ended up opting out of any RAID for the moment and just picked up the latest WD velociraptor. So far I'm pretty pleased with it and am seeing a pretty decent speed increase in load times etc. It probably wasn't worth the price though hehe.

[cyberfish]

If you don't care that much about price and capacity (you can always get a second large harddrive for storage), an SSD is about the fastest thing you can get. I got a Intel X25-M, with 250MB/s read and 80MB/s write (write is not nearly as important, of course), with ~0 seek time. My Ubuntu boots in < 10 seconds. Starting applications feel like they are already cached in memory. Even Vista loads in about 20 seconds. For real world usage, seek time is much more important than raw throughput, and SSDs are really good at that.

[cpjust]

Ya, this rig is mostly setup to play the latest and greatest games. I ended up opting out of any RAID for the moment and just picked up the latest WD velociraptor. So far I'm pretty pleased with it and am seeing a pretty decent speed increase in load times etc. It probably wasn't worth the price though hehe.

If you wouldn't mind downloading & running HDTune on your Velociraptor, I'd be pretty interested in seeing how it compares with the Seagate Barracudas...

[cyberfish]

I heard the recent Velociraptors are really not worth the HUGE premium ($240 for 150GB at my "local" store - ncix) anymore. Even my WD Black ($70 for 750GB) can do ~100MB/s.

For the price of VRs, might as well get a SSD for much higher performance.

[valaris]

If you wouldn't mind downloading & running HDTune on your Velociraptor, I'd be pretty interested in seeing how it compares with the Seagate Barracudas...

With the free version and a 30 second scan I received minimum 90mb/s and maximum 126mb/s transfer rates.

Ya I did check out some ssd's, but the price to the performance gain seemed incredibly small, and in some cases the velociraptor still won out. At least on the benchmarks I looked at.

WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD • Register Hardware

[cyberfish]

With the free version and a 30 second scan I received minimum 90mb/s and maximum 126mb/s.

That is obtainable from the faster 7200RPM drives today, at fractions of the price, and multiples of the capacity. The 10000 RPM drive only wins slightly in random access speed.

Ya I did check out some ssd's, but the price to the performance gain seemed incredibly small, and in some cases the velociraptor still won out. At least on the benchmarks I looked at.

WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD • Register Hardware

They compared it to one of the slowest drives by today's standard.
The Intel X25-M 80GB Solid State Drive Review - CrystalDiskMark v2.1 - Legit Reviews

Note that they are comparing _2_ VRs to a single SSD. The SSD wins a little bit in sequential read (which is platter HDs' relative strength), and by several times in random read (this is most important in real world usage - reading many small files. For example, when booting or launching applications) and random write.

The weakness of this particular SSD is in sequential write, but exactly how often do you write huge files? There are SSDs with high write performance, too. For example the OCZ Vertex.
OCZ Vertex 120GB v1.10 MLC SSD Review - CrystalDiskMark v2.2 - Legit Reviews
It's actually a bit cheaper than the Intel drive. But because how important random access speed is, the Intel drive is usually considered superior to the Vertex.

If you use them in a laptop, there are several additional advantages - low power consumption (longer battery life), shock-resistent, low heat (harddrives heating up the palm rest gets uncomfortable).

The Intel X25-M now sells for about $235.

[cpjust]

With the free version and a 30 second scan I received minimum 90mb/s and maximum 126mb/s transfer rates.

Ya I did check out some ssd's, but the price to the performance gain seemed incredibly small, and in some cases the velociraptor still won out. At least on the benchmarks I looked at.

WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD • Register Hardware

I'm more interested in the average speed rather than the min/max. Also, what about the seek time?

[cpjust]

That is obtainable from the faster 7200RPM drives today, at fractions of the price, and multiples of the capacity. The 10000 RPM drive only wins slightly in random access speed.

Really? Which drives would that be?
Seagate Barracuda's are supposed to be one of the fastest and I can only get a Max of about 100MB/s with an average of 85MB/s.

I agree, the price & size is much better with 7200's. That's why I just went with RAID, since I could get the speed above the 10K RPM drives at a fraction of the cost/MB.