How fast exactly is Raid?

[CrysisComa]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148445&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-RSSDailyDeals-_-na-_-na&AID=10521304&PID=4176827&SID=18cvucxwalm8g

I am soon going to come into possession of 4 of these drives. My question. How fast exactly do you think it would boot up if i had them set in Raid 0?

Right now with my 250gb HDD boot time is about 2 minutes.

 

[foscooter]

RAID 0 effectively doubles your reads/writes.

This DO NOT happen with HDD. HDD don't scale like SSD.

I can't speak for 4 drives, but I once has 2 HDDs in RAID 0, and got less than a 50% boost. (i.e if my reads were 100MBps, and in RAID 0 they were like 140MBps.)

Instead of get 4 HDD, get 1 SSD! I go from push the button to Windows in like 12 seconds. BIOS post is the slowest part of booting up.

 

[yoji]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148445&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-RSSDailyDeals-_-na-_-na&AID=10521304&PID=4176827&SID=18cvucxwalm8g

I am soon going to come into possession of 4 of these drives. My question. How fast exactly do you think it would boot up if i had them set in Raid 0?

Right now with my 250gb HDD boot time is about 2 minutes.

You dont give us much about your current drive.... so cant tell how much faster...
It will be faster... but how much - hard to tell.
Much will depend on what kind of rubbish you have starting up with windows.. and what ver of windows?
My daughters machine - similar to yours prob boots in 45 seconds (win 7... 64 bit) so why yours 2 mins? inplies you either have slow HDD or you have crap starting up with it.
My machine.. which was Raid 0... i7 OC... would boot in about 35 seconds... have some stuff starting with win
Mine now faster since I have SSD.

Cheers

 

[po1nted]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148445&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-RSSDailyDeals-_-na-_-na&AID=10521304&PID=4176827&SID=18cvucxwalm8g

I am soon going to come into possession of 4 of these drives. My question. How fast exactly do you think it would boot up if i had them set in Raid 0?

Right now with my 250gb HDD boot time is about 2 minutes.

Hard to say. You should notice an improvement in boot time, but I do not believe it would be possible to narrow it down to a specific number. There are a lot of variables in boot time. For instance, one of my laptops used to boot in ~20 seconds. However, after I loaded drivers for my peripherals, software, etc the time has increased to a little under a minute. And this is from a single Samsung SSD.

It is safe to say your boot times would probably improve some... but how much would need to be determined by clocking it after the transition to Raid 0.

Are you going to reinstall your OS and all supporting software from scratch? That alone may improve your boot time.

A better benefit of Raid 0 would be your experience using the machine AFTER it has booted. Which should be improved noticeably. Also, look in to tweaking your Windows (assuming you use windows) settings/software/drivers/programs that load on boot.

If you are only interested in increasing boot speed then you may want to look at using a low capacity SSD for your boot drive and an HDD for your data/larger programs. That would most likely result in better boot times and general performance than two of the HDDs at a similar price point.

 

[tokencode]

In theory, your transfer speeds should be 4x as fast as a single similiar drive, but in practice you probably see something like 3-3.5x the speed of a single drive (maybe less if you are limited by your controller). Your access times will remain identical to that of a single similiar drive. Aside from speed, there are 2 other major considerations putting those 4 drives in a RAID 0, reliability and partitioning.

A 4 drive RAID0 array will be 4x as likely to fail as a single similiar drive. If any one of those drives dies, your entire RAID0 partition will be lost (there are ways to recover the data but it's not pretty and they require that the "dead" drive be at least mostly readable). You said you're coming into posession of those 4 drives, are they used? This is a major consideration since the array is only as reliable as the least reliable drive int he set.

If you put 4 750s in a RAID 0 you'll end up with a 3TB array. You will either need to partition this volume into 2 seperate partitions of no more than 2TB each or use GPT partition if you are running windows. GPT partitions are only bootable if you have a UEFI BIOS.


If I were you I would take 2 drives and make a RAID 0 array out of 2 of the disks, and partition into (2) 750GB partitions. Take the other 2 disk and create a 750GB RAID 1 array. Install your OS on the first RAID0 750GB partition and setup a weekly job to image the boot partition to your RAID 1 array. This will give you 750GB of fast storage that is also backed up in the event of a failure as well as 750GB of extra storage that would not be backed up.

Additionally you could create a RAID10 array which will give you same the same performance and space as a 2 disk RAID0 but will protect against a drive failure. I didn't recommend this solution though because it is not a true backup as you cannot "undo" something at the software level such as deleting files, a virus etc.