Yes of course for people heavily backed up RAID 0 can be beneficial in some ways. But for the OP, RAID 0 is almost certainly a terrible idea. As for game loading times being effected by RAID 0, I use a single 120GB Sammy for my games and I'm often in before the raptor and RAID 0 users, ram seems to play a rather large role in game loading times also(got 2GB, and it's at 250mhz).
Um, it kind of is RAID0 will almost certainly make loading games faster, but its unlikely to save more than a few seconds. As a comparison, my games run off an array a whole buttload faster than a 2 disk RAID0 (350MB/s sustained and 700MB/s burst reads) and loading times are around twice the speed of a single drive.
thats what i find with mine and with games like BF2 a few seconds can make the difference between getting the vehicle you want and getting stuck at the spawn. can i ask what drives you using in this array and how many to get that sort of speed?
lol I did see that but I wanted to know what configuration as there are so many different configurations you could have with 6 drives.
Ah, well he can probably give you more detail himself but last time I asked Tad was using it all in RAID 5.
tis indeed RAID5 Good to see that proper 2.5" flash drives are starting to appear, though I'd definitely like to see some real-world performance figures before springing so much money on a mere 16GB. Would definitely consider a 32GB one for my main system if it turns out to be a big benefit
Well, to begin with, the advantages of raid 0 throughput (mixed as they are) have nothing to to with the mistaken impression that two 160's equal a 320 in raid 0. If the user thinks that, he or she is likely to spend a lot of unproductive time looking for the other half of the drive. Secondly the advantages recognized by a raid 0 user in a desktop environment are likely to be pretty much proportional to their emotional and financial investment. We're talking pride, here. In particular, small files and high latency drives will show gains that many would judge not worth the overall ag.
you stated that creating a RAID0 array with 2x160GB disks does not create a 320GB volume. It most certainly does, windows views any array that isn't in pure software as a single volume. It can't tell the difference between a 320GB drive or 2x160 in RAID0, 2x320 in RAID1, 3x160 in RAID5, 6x80 in RAID6 and so on. I never said that advantages would be seen accross the board. The thing that RAID0 is good at is large sequential transfers, be it reads or writes. So when youre working with large files, ie recording HD video streams, working on on especially large images or audio files, RAID0 can exhibit a performance gain. Another area where increased HDD throughput can lead to an increase in performance is loading games. In a great deal of games, that few seconds you spend waiting for a level to load consists of reading a handful of very large files into memory. Increase the speed at which large sequential reads can be carried out and you increase the speed that the game can be loaded. That is not to say the HDD bandwidth is the only factor, other aspects in system performance always play a part. This is why 2 disk RAID0 doesn't cut loading times in half and 4 disks won't halve that again. For the vast majority of users, RAID0 pointless exercise (including, IMO, people who implement it solely for the reduction in game loading times). Unless one uses it for a very specific case (and even then, uses the striped volume only for that purpose) any fractions of seconds gained in a few applications will be outweighed by many seconds lost in the majority of PC uses.
Mister Tad - does RAID 5 take up much in the way of CPU cycles? And what happens if a drive fails - do you just plug another in and wait for it to rebuild the array, with the computer unusuable in the meantime?
RAID5 takes a lot of processing power. With a pure hardware RAID card there is zero cpu usage, with something like onboard RAID5 or a seperate software based RAID5 card, the CPU can get pretty hammered. If a drive fails, all it needs is another drive to rebuild the array. The dead one can be swapped out for a new one or a new one can be added. You can also have a hot-spare, which is when there is an empty drive reserved for a drive failure (onto which it starts automatically rebuilding) Until the array is rebuilt, it does business as usual in a degraded state. Performance in this state depends on the controller. On a good hardware RAID5 card there is very little difference between degraded performance and when it is running at full throttle. On a software based RAID5 implementation the system can be as good as unuseable given the additional load on the CPU and the low disk throughput.
So a motherboard's onboard RAID will take a bite out of the CPU when running something like RAID 5 then... Presumably RAID 1 is a lot less CPU-intensive?
Mister tad as I understand a good raid 0 array will be more reliable since it can ebuild data on a corrupted/dead drive when a new one is added to replace it plus speed. I think I heard you say otherwise but just wondering hardware raid may be nice.
when you say do you mean due to the fact the array is more likely to fail or the fact that small file reads & writes can take longer on RAID 0? Fail enough you use RAID 5 which gives you a mix of very fast speeds for reads and decent speeds for writes due to have 6 disc's and a hardware controller, but that setup must have cost around £600 at a guess, which for most people is way beyound budget, for what is esentially a games machine / portal to internet p0rn (for most people) at which point RAID0 gives an affordable option if you want to pretty much double your drive speed, as you still get double capacity at the trade off of redundancy, which IMO most people on a budget will take the risk if its a secondary drive or the information isn't critical. Would i be right in assuming you use yours as part of your job?
I think you got the wrong end of the stick there. One of the main disadvantages of RAID0 is that if one drive dies, you lose everything on every drive in the array. due to the fact that RAID0 doesnt deal with nonsequential reads or writes very well. The main reason I'm using RAID5 is the redundancy, the performance is just an added bonus. I agree that £600 (or £800 as the case may be) is far beyond budget for most, I wasn't suggesting that it wasn't. The best option otherwise is to jsut use seperate drives without any form of RAID. With some careful planning, 2 seperate drives can lead to a faster system than 2 drives in RAID0. There is more than one way to achieve concurrent disk access than RAID.
How does RAID 1 compare to a single drive in terms of read/write times? Obviously it's the most wasteful size-wise but anyhow...
This isnt true, if you lose a drive in RAID0 you lose the array and all the data on it, if you add another drive you get a blank drive and a drive with half a filesystem on it, ie unuseable. RAID5 provides the best trade off between speed and reliability (of the readily available RAID types), it can take losing a drive and the array being rebuilt when a new drive is added. RAID3 is also possible with the Revo64 card, totally hardware and only £40ish from scan at the moment. Its similar to RAID5 but stores parity on a single hard drive as opposed to spreading it across the whole array. The only downside to the Revo64 is its limited by being 66mhz PCI (max 266MB/s) where most mid/high end RAID controllers are PCI-X or PCIe. So dont dont dont use RAID0 unless you can cope with losing everything on the drives, or you have it backed up. Id say go with RAID5 or 3.
