RAID 0 improves writting speed, but not reading speed

[niz]

In answer to the thread subject, RAID 0 does improve both reading and writing speed considerably.
Have a look at this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/areca-arc1220_4.html

OK its actually a review of a raid controller but check the performance graphs and you get the point...

 

[happy_fanboy]

I think RAID is neat but if youre that into your games youre going to have twice the chance for problems striping 2 drives for performance.
If you want uninterrupted gameplay you should be mirroring
Once you get into RAID 5 you can have more system stability and fast sustained reading speed, however cheap conttrollers for that drastically hurt writing performance.

 

[happy_fanboy]

Ultimatley it might actually hurt gameplay because the RAID 0 performance is only apparent when youre doing larger sustained reads and writes. Games will be more apt to need quick access to small pieces of information scattered about the file system, and this is where RAID performace can be worse than a single drive.
If money is no object you can invest in a high performing card such as an Areca and then yes you can get better file system performance accross the board. You can also stripe a lot of HDDs with one of them.
Tell you what if youre only after good functionality and features i must give the Geforce 6150 a thumbs up in reliability and functionality for the price.

 

[RyanMicah]

the problem there, is it may have 'seemed' 3 times faster... but its 'physically impossible' for that to even be so, just from raiding 2 identical drives together... perhaps maybe the game had already been cached into your systems ram, after an initial load... having things stored in ram would definetly improve loading times honestly... ...but performance of a hdd will not triple, when youre only 'at best' doubling its potential performance from an additional hdd.

for performance to triple, assuming perfomance is scaling perfectly linearly... you would need 3 identical hdds, and enough bandwidth available to do so... same with 4 drives, 5 drives, and so on.
on much more than hdd performance... with an iRAM drive for instance,

Good point.

wait... if Raid 0 has improvements, then which one improves better? Raid 0 or 1? (compare to JBOD)

(so we are working on a level playing field of perhaps say same number of drives)

Obviously has no clue what Raid-1 or Raid-5 are...

 

[niz]

I think RAID is neat but if youre that into your games youre going to have twice the chance for problems striping 2 drives for performance.
If you want uninterrupted gameplay you should be mirroring
Once you get into RAID 5 you can have more system stability and fast sustained reading speed, however cheap conttrollers for that drastically hurt writing performance.

Mirroring is stupid for a desktop environment.

You get half the storage and a big performance hit over having the same drives in raid 0. (in fact mirrored drives are slower than even a single drive). The only thing you get is more safety, which if you used raid 5 you'd also get + better performance and more space.

Anyway as my raptors have a 1.2 million hour MTBF, drive problems are so unlikely to occur its a non-issue. Even if they do, I still have another drive I use just for occasional backups so even if my raid array got totally wiped out it still wouldn't be a problem.

 

[RyanMicah]

For those of you who are clueless. Raid-0 takes two hard drives and can read from at the same time as though it was one drive. Raid-1 takes two hard drives and makes them exact copies. In the event that one drive fails it simply reads off the other drive and informs you that your drive has failed during post. If you have Raid-0+1 (arguably the best) then you are using 4 drives total, two of sets of two. Go to wikipedia or a hard drive manufacturer website for more information. I believe Nvidia (as well as countless others) have information, as they create raid controllers and drivers.

 

[rantsky]

Mirroring is stupid for a desktop environment.

You get half the storage and a big performance hit over having the same drives in raid 0. (in fact mirrored drives are slower than even a single drive). The only thing you get is more safety, which if you used raid 5 you'd also get + better performance and more space.

Not true.

1. IMO a backup drive should only be RAID 1. I think a backup drive should be completely reliable, i.e. once you put something on it, it is not lost. A single HD does not deliver this reliability as it has a real chance of crashing and/or loosing data at any given moment. RAID 5 is reliable, but requires many hard drives so is often impractical.

2. RAID 1 has approximately the same writing speed as a single HD (just a minor hit), but has the high reading speed of RAID 0 as the controller interleaves the reading process (every modern controller does). There is absolutely no "big performance hit" here if you use a reasonable controller.

3. RAID 0 is great for speeding up a desktop, but is not an option unless you have very good backup... which brings us back to RAID 1. I guess what I'm trying to say is that each RAID type is useful for a very different task, it just depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Cheers

Anyway as my raptors have a 1.2 million hour MTBF, drive problems are so unlikely to occur its a non-issue.

About this.. I've seen so many new hard drives (<1 year old) just die suddenly without any notice, that I really wouldn't put my money on those MTBF figures. That's just it that it is the *mean* time betwen failure, which implies that the actual time can vary. Not to mention that a drive can suffer damage by getting hit, power failures, or many other stuff that "MTBF" just doesn't protect against.

 

[mark8987]

Anyway as my raptors have a 1.2 million hour MTBF, drive problems are so unlikely to occur its a non-issue.

Mate, that 1.2 million hour MTBF is close to meaningless. Numerous other threads have pointed this out. None of the current drives show excellent reliability. Check out www.storagereview.com

 

[happy_fanboy]

Anyway as my raptors have a 1.2 million hour MTBF, drive problems are so unlikely to occur its a non-issue.

Mate, that 1.2 million hour MTBF is close to meaningless. Numerous other threads have pointed this out. None of the current drives show excellent reliability. Check out www.storagereview.com

I DID NOT SAY THAT! YOU QUOTED THE WRONG PERSON!!!

 

[niz]

Anyway as my raptors have a 1.2 million hour MTBF, drive problems are so unlikely to occur its a non-issue.

Mate, that 1.2 million hour MTBF is close to meaningless. Numerous other threads have pointed this out. None of the current drives show excellent reliability. Check out www.storagereview.com

I don't see how you can say none of the drives have excellent reliability (presumably including raptors) when everyone else is syaing how relaible they are and there aren't enough postings of 150mb raptors to for the survey you referenced to even show a result. Mate.

Anyway, all the indicators are that raptors are incredibly reliable over long term from the older models. Also they're intended for enterprise applications so are made to be more reliable than desktop drives. They also get a 24 hour burn-in before they even leave the factory, and thats probably unique for sata drives.

 

[RyanMicah]

They run them for 24 hrs? That's hot! No seriously, those raptors put out a HELL of a lot of heat. Mine were way too hot to touch. I read this is normal. My aluminum X-Qpack is nearly melting.

 

[happy_fanboy]

Please mark8987, edit your post and remove my name from the quote i did not say. People are now re-quoting this INVALID quote of mine and thats not cool please change it. Thank you.

 

[hugoeng]

Doesnt any of you guys care about noice? Two Samsung Spinpoints are barely audible but I can imagine the kind of sound that raptors emit. Any experinces of this?
And if you buy one raptor why not two...

Other than that I think Toms should do an article on raid 0 as it seems to be a lot of opinions about performance. Personally I trust (realistic*) scientific tests more than user opinions.

Buy a comp. book from amazon based on user reviews and see for yourself...

*NOT FX60 2GB SuperduperRAM Best videocard money can buy etc.

 

[RyanMicah]

Yes, Toms needs to do a review on raid controllers. Someone tell them. We want to know the truth about Raid-0 and Raid-1. Does Raid-0 help in game situations? Is it better to have one small 10,000rpm drive for windows and then put everything else on a 7200rpm drive? Does it work better to have 4 small drives, one for each major game, or is it better to have one big defragmented one? Will mirroring help your computer to access strewn information faster? Is 0+1 ideal in most situations? How much real increase is a raptor over a 7200 caviar? We demand the TRUTH! Forget about who f'n pays you off to say crap about their products. We KNOW that some reviews are for sale. We want unbiased reviews, we want to know which products are the best, we can figure out value on our own so save the stupid "average prices on pricegrabber" crap. Those averages aren't real-time, nor are they accurate since I've seen video cards for $1 for 15 minutes on pricegrabber. The products aren't even that well organized and the filters don't always work. Give us FACTS, not prices. Give us TRUTH, not opinion. We can figure out opinions and prices on our own. Accuracy is everything. We rely on the testers and engineers at Toms for information on products and that's ALL we want from the site other than news and this forum. We don't want you to sell us stuff. We don't mind advertising, a good deal posted next to what our reading is still a good deal. But don't try to talk us into anything. Just give us the facts.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

this toms artical about the 150gb raptor might be of some help. they tested a raptor single drive up a RAID 0 array of 7200 rpm disks.

The Raptor-X's performance is even good enough to beat a RAID 0 array consisting of two modern 7,200 RPM drives, except in terms of pure throughput, of course.

Link

 

[RyanMicah]

"RAID 0 generally is the best choice if you require high data transfer rates; in fact, it is possible to almost double throughput numbers by deploying a RAID 0 configuration. However, access times do not improve, and sometimes you will even see an increase in access time. Your everyday life with Windows won't be accelerated much by using a RAID 0 array, even if many people tend to believe that! We have proof for this statement in the form of benchmark numbers that compare the WD1500 Raptor with a two-drive RAID 0 setup that consists of two 7,200 RPM drives."

This basically says that loading games will be faster in Raid-0, but nothing else. In fact you may see a slight decrease in access time for basic computing.

Makes me wonder if I should upgrade my CPU's in both of my AMD64 comps and just split my raptors as boot drives, one in each. Right now I have a Caviar 160gig 7200rpm raid-0 setup in one and a Raptor 150gig 10K rpm Raid-0 in the other. In my bigger system I have extra storage in the form of a 10gig 5400rpm drive, and an 80gig 7200rpm drive. The chips are a mere Athlon 3000+ (bought the cheapest with upgrading to FX-60 in mind) and a 4200+X2, to be put in my cheaper system. I want two good systems, one for a friend to use when they come over and for lan parties (mATX), and then my power system for my own gaming (SLI option but not currently used). I'm going to be rearranging my systems here soon to optimize power in one of them, and eventually kick this 3000+ chip over to my HTPC I'm starting to build.

I'm still a little split what to do with my drives. Anyone else have some suggestions?

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

im kind of lost on what you want. you first say that you would like 2 good systems so your friend can use one for lans and such. then you say that your thinking about just combining the good stuff form both into one system.

If you need two good systmes, split the 10,000 rpm drives, if you want one power systme raid 0 the raptors then throw the other 2 in for backing up data.

An Idea I have been kicking around in my head has been to RAID 0 4 hdds and then add a 5th to do back ups to. I dont know if there is a point where adding more hdd's to a RAID 0 becomes usless but I would like to do it. If Im wrong I could simply then do a RAID 0+1 and an extra drive for more space, or a RAID 5. HDDs are so cheap now I dont see why not.

 

[zenmaster]

I "think" you will see quite a benefeit from Raid 0 in the laptop.
HDDs are normally the bottleneck, but 7200RPM notebook drives are far slower than 7200 Desktop drives since they use 2.5 vs 3.5 platters.

Therefore the drives are more of a bottleneck than normal and hence show a better performance increase.

Personally, I would never run my systems in Raid 0 due increased chance of complete data loss in when configuring my disks as a non-redundant array of independant disks.

 

[RyanMicah]

No, I want my small X-Qpack 64 bit system for two uses; for lan parties, and for having friends over. It's STILL powerful enough for most games, even with just a 7200rpm drive and onboard 6150 GPU. I plan to upgrade though. Right now it has dual raptors in it. I'm thinking of putting those in my better gaming system, but think maybe I should just split the raptors (one in each system) and use them as single, system drives. My other raid-0 drives (7200rpm caviars) would then be used as single drives also, one in each system. Is this better than having the raptors together in Raid-0? My question is, would it be to have the 7200rpm drives in raid-0 in my secondary system and the raptors in my power system in raid-0? Or better to go ahead and split them? Will I appreciate the raptors more in Raid-0 or as two system drives?

 

[Talon]

I'd have to agree raid does make a difference in many situations. It is a noticable difference in many cases.

I for one wouldn't give two cents for a synthetic benchmark. I've read many reviews where a synthetic was neck and neck and the real-world benchmarks told a different story.

I can cite one instance in particular; I used to play a particular MMO that I had terrible load times on. I broke down and tried raid 0 for the first time. It did indeed improve my loads into the game, from one area to another through portal systems etc. I went from arriving in a new town about 10-20 seconds after a friend of mine with a newer system to me arriving about 5-10 seconds ahead of him every time. Nothing else in system changed.

Of course some things show little to no "apparent" gain yet other times depending on the game or app the benefit can be obvious. Shrug

 

[RyanMicah]

Personally, I would never run my systems in Raid 0 due increased chance of complete data loss in when configuring my disks as a non-redundant array of independant disks.

Raid-0 isn't that risky. LOL Besides, it's called OS reinstall. So a drive fails, you replace it and reinstall programs. If you can afford 2 drives you can probably afford 3. Get a big slower drive and just copy important crap over to it. That way you have it backed up. Putting all your important data on a single drive isn't safe either. Besides, if you ever want to move your array to another system, your raid's gonna get messed up anyway. Raid-0 is great for a gaming specific machine. Save games can always be placed on a shared drive.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

I see not that much of an increaces risk of my data being lost in a RAID 0 set up. I mean sure there is a little more risk but once you think about it, its worth it. HDD's go bad in one of 2 ways: 1 they just up and die 2 they go through a slow loud death.

if your hdd just up and dies the only way to save your data is if your running RAID 5 or 0+1. It seems that people want RAID 0 or nothing so not much can be done if a HDD up and dies.

however if your hdd starts making all kinds of noise you know its going down and you need to back up things asap. it doesnt matter if you got one disk or RAID 0 you should be able to back up the data before it goes kaput. so I see it as RAID 0 is not that much less safe than a one disk set up. basicly it doubles the chance of a hdd just dieing, but the chance of that is slim to nill so double slim to nill and still not that likely.

That being said this is still how I do things

There is no substitute for doing backups even if you run a RAID 5. I have my important data on 3 seperate drives, the hdd in my pc, a back up hdd that me and my brother both use and then my brothers hdd in his pc at his house. So even if my house burns to the ground with my backup hdd i can still get my data back.

Oh yeah I also keep the most important stuff in a 4th place my good ol 4gb pen drive that is always with me.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

No, I want my small X-Qpack 64 bit system for two uses; for lan parties, and for having friends over. It's STILL powerful enough for most games, even with just a 7200rpm drive and onboard 6150 GPU. I plan to upgrade though. Right now it has dual raptors in it. I'm thinking of putting those in my better gaming system, but think maybe I should just split the raptors (one in each system) and use them as single, system drives. My other raid-0 drives (7200rpm caviars) would then be used as single drives also, one in each system. Is this better than having the raptors together in Raid-0? My question is, would it be to have the 7200rpm drives in raid-0 in my secondary system and the raptors in my power system in raid-0? Or better to go ahead and split them? Will I appreciate the raptors more in Raid-0 or as two system drives?

I would say that how you raid or not raid your 4 hdds depends on how you back up your data. if you have a good back up system like I do go on and raid 0 the 7200 in one system and raid 0 the 10,000 in another, you will like the perfomance of the raid 0 in both systems.

If however you dont have a good back up system like most people, I would then tell you to put your data(that is important like music pics ect) on at least 2 seperate drives. however you can do that is what I would say to do. I think you might be able to do this....raid 0 the raptors in one power pc then just put the other 2 in the other pc normal and back up the data on the raid 0 to this pc often

However, it seems to me that you are not too into games and bleeding performace so off of that assumption I would say split the raptors to both pc's to have 2 good pc's.

hey then maybe you could cluster them??? thats fun

 

[zenmaster]

But each to his own. Some want the raw speed and I can see the need in LAN parties. Myself, I can live w/o that little extra and prefer the safety.

I just like pointing out that RAID-0 has no fault-tolerance since not all folks quite get that. Once you know, its up to you to decide on safe lazy day drive with your PC or a mind number friday night dragstrip.

I prefer my lazy day drives but don't begrudge the dragsters and know far few die than one would think if you measured a parents concern.

 

[ragemonkey]

How much perfromance you get out of a RAID 0 config has everything to do with how you set it up and use it.

The first thing you have to do is figure out what your optimal block size is. I will not go into an explanation here as there are a lot of real good resources on RAID configurations.

Typically, using a RAID 0 setup as your boot/system volume will not seem to do much at all for you in terms of performance because of all of the additional overhead that Windows puts on the volume.

You could instead setup a stand alone drive for windows, and the RAID to only install games -- but because so much of any program is stored within \windows\system32 -- you may not see much here either.

My happy medium was to install windows on the RAID and offload all user settings (my documents, etc.) and swapfile to another volume. The added benefit to this is *when* (not if) the RAID goes down I still have my document files/music/downloads/etc.

On my system, I use 2 WD 74G raptors in a RAID0 config as my system/boot/program volume. I also use a WD 320GB PMR drive as my data/pagefile volume.

As a result, Windows installed in about 6 minutes. Windows boots in about 6-8 seconds to desktop and games load much faster.

Here is what it all did for me:
1 WD Raptor by itself was typically 80-90MB/s data transfer
2 WDs in RAID0 is typically 120-130MB/s data transfer
The 320GB drive by itself is between 60-70MB/s

So for me it makes a big difference. This setup is, however, optimized for gaming. I have another system setup for audio/video... and it is completely different. Once again, it is all in how you set it up.