RAID-0: Revisited ... and it's good!

[Saxito Pau]

Well gentlemen and gals, it has been quite some time since I last tinkered with RAID-0

http://www.carigamers.com/cms/forums/index.php/topic,12539.0.html

And after much deliberation. I decided to jump in again.

My revived desktop gaming rig has 3 drives: a 250GB OS drive and two 500GB for data, all different brands and cache sizes. Then i have a 1.5TB E-SATA external as a backup of the other three.

After making the necessary backups, I decided to try out RAID on the two 500GB, with 16MB and 32MB cache resp.

WARNING and DISCLAIMER: RAID-0 has NO redundancy!!! If one drive fails, you lose everything on all drives! Saxman assumes no liability for any loss of data as a result of you trying what I have tried, espically if you did not have a dedicated backup drive like I have.

The result was a top read speed of just 93MB/s, which was less than that of my 1.5TB drive at over 120MB/s!!

So I decided to take a chance to see if i can increase speed further  and headed off to Circuit Zone to buy THREE WD Caviar Blue 500GB drives with 16MB cache at a cost of less than $500 each

When I got home I pulled out the other 3 drives (which may go up for sale soon) and stuck the new ones in.

It took a lil while to figure out how to enable RAID in my Gigabye P45 board, but once that was done, the 3- drive array was created quickly.

Next step: Installing Windows 7 32-bit

*an important side note: I did run into some trouble with the install where it refused to create the necssary partitions to start the actuall install. It was fixed by smply setting the RAID-0 as first in the boot order. This appears to be a common Windows 7 install issue.*

As for the install itself? not even 15 minutes. the vast majority (before final reboot) was completed in 10.

As for data transfer rates? I installed HD Tune 2.55 and ...

Max Read speed: 220+ MB/s
Min Read speed: 150MB/s
Avg Read speed: 190MB/s

*hands readers bounty paper towels in case of 'spills, nerd-gasms, jizzes', etc...*

Windows 7 appears to fly up, not start up... the welcome screen literally flashes before you get your desktop. Software installation, especally off the hard drive? ohhh, my goodness!

In later posts I will put up a series of official/actual benchmarks and screenshots

[Netizen1]

Well look how I didn't know one could use more than 2 drives in a Striped (RAID-0) array!!

Nice job Sax. I gonna test my striped array when I get home to see how it compares

[Spazosaurus]

hmmm...

*ponders getting a second 300gig velociraptor and setting up a raid 0

[Saxito Pau]

Well look how I didn't know one could use more than 2 drives in a Striped (RAID-0) array!!

Nice job Sax. I gonna test my striped array when I get home to see how it compares

My motherboard allows me to use up to SIX drives for a RAID-0 array. With that many drives, however, you'd be silly not to be using RAID-5 or RAID 0+1 in the long term.

One importat warning: the higher the number of drives used in RAID-0 array, the higher the risk of failure.

This article will give you some nice stuff to consider: RAID-0 using 2 to 8 drives

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/RAID-SCALING-CHARTS,1635.html

[Crixx_Creww]

oh.. from the title i thought they release some uber new code or something that makes raid 0 even more uber

0+1 is the flick fer sure
the setup i made in work is 0+1 on dedicated raid card (cost 1500 mc dollars sigh)

[Netizen1]

at home the setup is presently a RAID-0 for the OS and a RAID-1 for data

waiting on cash to build back up, and 1.5TB price to come back down.

(I got 2 raptors )

[Arcmanov]

* thumbs nose at the idea of raid *

Not comfortable enough with current HDD reliability to even bother attempting this.

That and TTEC mudda c*#t!!!

[Nephilim]

currently have a raid 0 and 5 set up, my main os on the stripe, shit does load faster and i've noticed a bit of performance increase over my ghey single 320, next stop is 2 stink 5's

[W1nTry]

Raid 0+1 is the most inefficient as it takes a minimum of 4 drives. RAID 5 is the server standard and requires a min of 3 drives. Catch though because RAID 5 is effectively Striping+Parity you lose space. Even so RAID 5 IS the way to go. That being said, onboard or 'soft' RAID is nowhere near as good as a DEDICATED RAID CONTROLLER. And I recently (within 3 months) read an article on toms or one of the ilk re-stating that. If you can afford a good RAID card then by all means go for RAID 5. Onboard imho should be used for cheap RAID 1 solutions.

A few links:
Tom's Hardware Drive Charts


IOMETER as opposed to HDTach

RAID Limitation on a P55 mobo (prolly manu/bios specific)

[Spazosaurus]

If your board has raid capability, I say use it. Them numbers sax throw up there are impressive, especially for the cost. Software raid or not, performance like that is pretty damn good w/o having to spend A LOT on a decent hardware solution.

IMO, for the ideal (home use) setup, one should have raid0 as a boot volume. What you've got there is something that holds only the OS, programs and games.

For everything else, setup a raid5 for storage purposes.

or

Do like me, pick up 3 1.5tb and 2 1tb external drives and setup a lil folder replication as backup, all on a simple Socket A terminal that sits on the space saver (with hard drives for company) that runs quietly and happily.

[Netizen1]

I'd much rather a drobo

www.drobo.com

but that is real frivolity

[Spazosaurus]

Average read speed on a single velociraptor: 103.0 MB/s

*Dreams of raid 0*

[W1nTry]

Idealy, you would have RAID 5 with a DEDICATED, BOOTABLE RAID controller with top of the line SSD HDs. I've seen the scores on Toms and anandtech, etc. Upwards of 600MBps top THAT XD

[TriniXaeno]

Or just delete the shit you already watched/played and survive on a 500gb drive, lol

next lotto I'll get some serious storage. That SSD raid w1ntry mentioned is the win. (pon intended) Till then, delete is my friend.

[W1nTry]

There IS one other option... SSD chips on a PCIe card with RAID XD
Fusion-io

And some old benchmarks: Toms Hardware

Pay special attention to THIS PAGE XD, HD Tach score to make a Whitney bellow like it's 'The Bodyguard' days

[Spazosaurus]

Yea boy them PCI-e chips WICKED hoss my lord.

Imagine two of them in raid0

Doh talk system booting faster than a calculator.

[Nephilim]

make a Whitney bellow like it's 'The Bodyguard' days

bout 5 man here go get that

[TriniXaeno]

US$899 for a 80gb drive that you can't even boot windows from???

amm.....my games don't take THAT long to load to warrant the spend.

That drive needs to be hitting US$149.99 and bootable to earn a "buy" from yours truly.

[Netizen1]

There IS one other option... SSD chips on a PCIe card with RAID XD
Fusion-io

And some old benchmarks: Toms Hardware

Pay special attention to THIS PAGE XD, HD Tach score to make a Whitney bellow like it's 'The Bodyguard' days

The thing that caught my eye more than the benchmarks was this for ~US$90

[TriniXaeno]

I had something like that in my sweat rig eight years ago. The idea got old fast. Fragility of drives and not being hot swappable killed it.

Now that sata is hot swappable, might make for an interesting comeback in the user space. Still, I think it might serve better in an external raid-esque box like your drobo.

nice find all the same

+1