I was considering purchasing 4 Samsusng Spinpoint F3 HD for my asus p6t motherboard and configuring them in RAID. Will I see a significant performance boost?
I certainly wouldn't put 4 HDDs into RAID0...you would just be looking at loosing all your data! RAID0 (with a 2 x HDD setup) would only be worthwhile using over a single HDD setup if you are copying/moving large (video) files and/or (un)zipping large amounts of data regularly...otherwise just use a single SSD/HDD for your OS... Have a read Here... ________ CLASSACTION SETTLEMENTS
I'm pretty in favor of raid, but most bit-techers aren't as far as I can tell. But it does depend what you want. Photoshop, for example, benefits greatly from raid0. But I wouldn't use it for storage if I were in your shoes (not to assume you wear shoes, but if you do, and I were in them, I wouldn't use raid for storage ). Backup is best done with an external hard disk, or just a clone onto a second disk.
It would be for storage but also for a scratch disk for adobe cs5. (premiere pro, after effects) and yes, I do wear shoes. Thanks for everyones reply.
RAID can help CS5 and other Adobe products a lot, IIRC, in terms of access speeds and the like, especially because the many millions of tiny files those programs create don't suit SSDs. However, that would be RAID 0, which is not a configuration you want your storage to be in, especially not irreplaceable data like video. Perhaps run a RAID 0 scratch disk (2xF3 500GB/1TB) and a RAID5 storage solution if you don't already run redundant backups?
Without a hardware RAID card, your RAID 5 performance won't be that great. RAID 5 can be quite CPU intensive when writing data, and on board RAID controllers aren't the best. You don't mention what your rig is, but unless it's a fast CPU with a ICH9 or ICH10 chip set, you may not see any performance gains at all over a single F3, and older/slower boards/CPUs can be quite slow. Even if you do have a i7 and ICH10, the gains won't be great, and will come with a high CPU overhead as the CPU will be doing all the parity calculations needed to write to the RAID. You need a dedicated, fast hardware RAID card to get good performance from RAID5. RAID5 is a poor choice for performance alone if using your motherboard's RAID controller. It's a good choice for storage because of redundancy. However, this doesn't mean it's backed up... it means that it can tolerate a drive failure. It won't protect you from accidental erasure, or theft, or 2 drives failing. You'll still need back up. If it's just storage you need, go with a 1 drive solution and have a second identical drive for back up. If you are editing the video from these drives then you'll obviously need performance, in which case, yes, RAID0 will be an advantage to you, but then you are twice as likely to lose your data due to drive problems. You MUST back up if you use RAID0. You should anyway, but especially with RAID0.
Further to Pookeyhead and PureSilver (and myself), you could slap your scratch disk onto a raid0 array of short-stroked drives (I've done this with three 80gig hitachi deskstars and its made a big difference) and then seperately backup important files on a seperate single disk. Et voila! Fast CS4 performance, and backed up important stuff .
With lots of drives RAID 3 is the perfect balance of speed and safety esentialy it means anyone drive can fail and you can still use the array. I use two Drives in Raid-0 and when one fails i will have to cry a lot but thats life. If i had more i would use RAID 3 or 5 if i had more drives and it would give a decent if not huge boost in speed i think the normal figures that are troted out for Raid speed gains are 20-40% but thats nearly always for Raid-0 and that has been my experiance a good solid boost in desktop responsivnes and also shorter loading times for programs game levels etc all in all win win if you can get it to work properly.
I've hit a snag. I have set up 2 RAID0 arrays on my Asus P6T deluxe motherboard. However, I have another single drive with my OS. It seems to me that once I set the controller to RAID all disks are RAID and windows now won't start!
In the Ctrl-I RAID setup menu my OS disk is set to non-raid, but it still appears at RAID in the BIOS setup utility?
I don't want it to be a member of a RAID array. I want a single separate disk for my OS, then 2 separate RAID arrays as extra drives.
I edited my previous post as it crossed the ether at the same time as your previous post and was made irrelevent. What motherboard do you have?
I have an Asus P5N-E SLI (different chipset I know) that has options in the m/b BIOS to setup RAID as well as a dedicated RAID menu ROM. I thought yours might have the same. I would suggest that, if it is possible, to get your rig back to how it was so you have the chance to do some homework before carrying out any potentially destructive (to data) changes. Here are some Asus support forum posts for your m/b and RAID setup that I found with a few minutes searching... Intel RAID - Questions and Answers http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...del=P5B+Deluxe/WiFi-AP&page=1&SLanguage=en-us Question about SATA/Raid setup http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...2&id=20100103211601859&page=1&SLanguage=en-us P6T Deluxe Raid Setup http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...e&id=20090107023844081&page=1&SLanguage=en-us Of particular interest is the bit about AHCI. Have a read of these posts and see if they shed any light on the matter. I have to leave work now but will be back online later, sorry I can't stay and help right now.
I have 2-disks in RAID 0 - running my OS and programs and I have a second pair in RAID 1 mirror - for all my files and OS image backups. So conclusion, only go for RAID 0 if you have a secondary drive to backup your stuff to. And to those who say that you lose all your data if one of the drives fails...... well you'd lose them anyway if you have a single disk and that disk fails. I don't see the difference, just restore from a system image and you'll be back in a day or 2.
