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Whats the Best HDD configuration RAID or Seperate Drives

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by neocleous, 27 Apr 2006.

  1. neocleous

    neocleous Minimodder

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    Hi all I currently have two 36GB Raptors that I plan to upgrade to two 150GB Raptors my question is am I better having windows on one drive and my apps on another or RAIDing them together into one 300GB drive and having everything on the two drives. I know I double my chance at data loss using this configuration but I'm asking from a performance prespective.
     
  2. felix the cat

    felix the cat Spaceman Spiff

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    the whole point of raptors (or so I am lead to believe) is that they have very low seek times (kinda like scsi) so if I was you I would not raid them, but just as you say use one for one and the other for the other!
     
  3. neocleous

    neocleous Minimodder

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    Well that makes my life easier seting up RAID when your trying to load windows with an nforce board is a pain.
     
  4. McKaamos

    McKaamos What's a Dremel?

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    With your mention of RAID i think you mean RAID0 or Stripe-RAID.
    There are many different levels of RAID. Stripe being very unsafe.
    You could go for 3 or more disks and use RAID5 (if you controller supports it), wich is Stripe /w Parity wich (through some basic math) can recalculate your data if one disk fails.

    Anyway, as far as I know, using any form or RAID doesn't affect seektimes, but does increase throughput. (if used with good quality controllers, and not software controlled crap)
     
  5. neocleous

    neocleous Minimodder

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    I have an Asus A8N32 board and Im just using the nVidia controler on there, forgive this lame description decause I'm not sure which type of RAID it is, but its the one where the data is split over the two drives so both drives work together when data is requested I think the is called Stripe. Saftey is not too important as these drives are tried and tested and I take regular backups.

    So McKaamos are you saying I'm better off with RAID from a performance standpoint?
     
  6. McKaamos

    McKaamos What's a Dremel?

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    In theory, yes.
    It depends on the controller wether it will be fast or not.

    I've looked up some reviews and as far as I can see the speed goes up between 10 and 25% on most controllers.

    http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q2/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=3
    http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=eoyraid&page=8

    From these results the NVRaid (from nForce4) seems to be very fast.
    So I'd go for the RAID option if data safety is not an issue.
    If data safety is important, go for RAID5 (and buy a seperate controller. NVRaid doesn't do RAID5)

    Btw, Stripe RAID = RAID0 = 2 (or more) disks connected together as one big one.
     
  7. Da_Rude_Baboon

    Da_Rude_Baboon What the?

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