RAID question

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Mon Aug 23, 2010 4:39 pm

ive had a lot of raid boards but never tried the raid part. ive seen it here i think that running a raid config can increase hdd performance. i just picked up a couple sata wd drives to try it. im wondering of the 2 raid modes my mobo supports 0 or 1 which would give me the best performance increase.

hat

Key Keeper · Post by **Key Keeper** » Mon Aug 23, 2010 4:55 pm

Raid 0 will give you more performance, but I would only use this for non critical data. Raid 1 will slow you down a tad due to redundancy. Has to write same data to the platters twice. I ran raid 0 for a long time and never had issues but ya never know when they go south...

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Mon Aug 23, 2010 5:00 pm

its a gaming rig im mostly looking for faster map load times.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Mon Aug 23, 2010 7:01 pm

Yup, RAID 0, but don't trust it. It'll fail ya just when you least expect it to (though I've had some last for years).

Key Keeper · Post by **Key Keeper** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:25 am

Ive found better load times were achieved with faster/more memory. Then again, might have just been the games I was playing.

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:35 am

how exactly does it fail? one of the hdds fail? loses config somehow?
my boards already maxed out on ram 8 gigs

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:57 am

More memory does in fact make a difference in some game load times. To a point.

They can fail in a number of ways, but usually from one of the drives failing or even a loose cable. Also, sometimes the controller itself fails.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 10:21 pm

With RAID 0 you have twice the risk. If either of the 2 drives fails, you lose it all.

With the speed of modern drives, I see little compelling reason to go RAID 0 anymore except MAYBE for pro video editing.

Frankly, you're better off just buying a Velociraptor or an SSD for your boot drive. That's what I did. I have a Velociraptor for my boot drive and a 1Tb Seagate for my data. I'm seriously considering swapping out my 150Gb Velociraptor for an 80Gb Intel X25-M SSD. At $200 it's cost effective for the performance gain (that's nearly what I paid for the Velociraptor last year).

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 4:39 pm

ok heres the results from my drives using hd tune pro 4 keep in mind i got the 2 raid drives at 40 each so for 80 bux i get a nice performance increase. also the green drive performs better than i thought it would.

raid0 2x wd blue 500gb
max 110.8 mb/s
avg 107.0 mb/s
access 15.1 m/s
burst 104.9 mb/s

seagate 320
max 67.8 mb/s
avg 61.8 mb/s
access 13.4 m/s
burst 146.9 mb/s

wd 500 green
max 78.4 mb/s
avg 63.2 mb/s
access 14.3 m/s
burst 144.5 mb/s

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 7:29 pm

Decent results there (a tad lower than I expected, but then again, I've been playing with server drives). Yeah, the green drives get a lot of crap that they don't deserve. Just because they are 5400rpm doesn't mean that they don't still spin plenty fast to move some data.

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 7:47 pm

normalicy wrote:Decent results there (a tad lower than I expected, but then again, I've been playing with server drives). Yeah, the green drives get a lot of crap that they don't deserve. Just because they are 5400rpm doesn't mean that they don't still spin plenty fast to move some data.

yeah i probly should have got the black edition drives but tiger direct was selling the retail packaged blues for 40 each. now i have a total of 2.0 tb storage in this machine. unfortunatly it didnt do a thing for my framerates but i didnt expect it to. when that card gets here it should take care of that.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 7:50 pm

Those speeds aren't anything to complain about though. The black editions aren't a ton faster. Now a pair of velocaraptors, that's different. I've never had a hard drive help my game speeds, only load times. Funny you mention the video card, I just got my first tracking update. You should get it pretty soon.

VidmanII · Post by **VidmanII** » Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:41 am

I would expect 2 of these in a RAID 0 and you'll be giggling at the speed. lol

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139175

the above advice is good. don't keep any data except the OS on a RAID 0 setup. I just updated my PC but prior to, I had a pair of WD Raptor 36GBs in a RAID 0 for 6 years and rarely turned the PC off. I even had a cable come loose on one of them producing a boot error. I plugged the cable back in and it booted like nothing had ever happened! Good to be lucky sometimes.

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Thu Nov 25, 2010 9:44 am

in a 2 drive raid0 isnt double the speed all you should realistically expect?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Nov 25, 2010 10:28 am

You'll never get double the speed with an onboard controller. Most onboard controllers are software based, so you take some performance hit for that.

Honestly, I wouldn't bother with RAID 0 nowadays unless you're doing something specialized like pro video editing.

Get a Velociraptor or an SSD boot drive.