Setting up my first RAID.

Caxus

So i've just kind of ignored the whole RAID thing for a few years and decided today that i should look into it. I did some research on it and it looks great i just have a few questions.

I want to do this as cheaply as possible so considering my motherboard already supports it i'm probably just going to buy a second identical HD and set it up per the MB's instructions for RAID 0.

My MB is a K8T NEO and this is my harddrive...

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st340016a.html


At first i thought i'd have to get a couple of Serial ATA hard drives but according to the MB manual it will work with the 40gb ultra ata 100 that i already have.

1) Am i right in assuming all i have to do is get another one of these hard drives for everything to work?

2) Will it double my effective hard drive speed?

3) Even if it will work with my current drive what would be the benefits of going for a pair of newer Serial ATA 150 drives?

Caxus

Actually i think i'm just going to get a couple of 80 gig Seagate SATA harddrives and go from there. That should be a lot faster than just getting a second ultra ATA 100 drive identical to the one i have now, shouldn't it? Or would i notice almost as much improvement if i just did that?

entropy

I don't know almost anything about RAID arrays. I do know, though, that I have a SATA 120gig Seagate. How fast does it run? Exactly on par with any IDE drive out there. So, you're best bet would be to get 2 10k rpm SATA drives. Aside from that, you could get away with IDE. The thing to remember is with RAID arrays you should ALWAYS HAVE THEM ENTIRELY BACKED UP! If I remember right, RAID 0 isn't mirrored, and if just one drive barfs, your array is shot along with any data you have on them.

I've never had a RAID array, I've only read and watched on the forum about them, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Caxus

The thing to remember is with RAID arrays you should ALWAYS HAVE THEM ENTIRELY BACKED UP! If I remember right, RAID 0 isn't mirrored, and if just one drive barfs, your arrays is shot along with any data you have on them.

Yeah but thats no different than a normal single hard drive crashing is it? I never have any really important information on my comp anyway.

Justin

Here's the deal... RAID 0 treats the two drives as one so if one dies, they are both gone. RAID 1 make duplicate copies so if one dies, it's OK, except for the price of replacement. Unless you are going to go with SATA 10k drives, or you are REALLY concerned about backing yourself up, as entropy said, you could get away with IDE. If you really want to do a RAID setup, I think you would want to go into RAID 0 as that gives you the double speed you are talking about. To be clear, you have information stripped across two drives running at the same speed. In theory, information can be retrieved twice as fast as you have two drives doing the work of one. That is where you are getting your double disk speed idea from. RAID 0 is very good and popular but if you aren't going to up your drive speed to 10k, I would be willing to bet you won't notice any difference. Look at the retrival time for the disks you are considering. Then compare them to 10k SATA drives. You will see the difference I am talking about. Judging from your sig, the best thing you could do to get faster response would be to go 10k SATA. NewEgg has raptors on sale...

entropy

Really? If you use 2 7,200 rpm drives, there's not much of an increase from a single 7,200 drive?

Justin

General response time. I have not tested two systems side by side but I would be willing to bet the differences aren't nearly as noticeable as dial-up vs. Broadband... Anybody actually have a stripped array that can testify? I just build them, don't use them...

bigdaddyTank

Here is an article on raid and game loading times done at overclockers.com
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1063/

Caxus

I see what you're talking about but i think that kind of speed would be more noticable with smaller files. For larger stuff, like game load times and boot up, i don't see how a single 10k could be faster than 2 7200's.

When you say i could get away with IDE you mean non SATA drives? The reason i ask is because i was just about to order these 80 gig seagate SATA's from newegg but i just happened to be in best buy today and they have 80 gig seagate ultra ATA 100's for $39 after a $50 mail in rebate.

Are you saying that i wouldn't notice a difference between SATA drives and ultra ATA 100's? If not then i'll snatch up a couple of those before the sale ends on saturday.

entropy

You won't notice a difference, as in fact, most SATA drives are just crossovers. All they did was teach the drive to recognize SATA and use SATA plugs, nothing else.

Garg

To really notice a performance increase, you'll need an expensive caching RAID controller card. I think I've heard our resident storage guru, Tex, say as much. If he doesn't pop into this thread, you might search for some of his posts on this forum. (edit - not having any luck finding a quote from Tex. Mayhaps it was an article elsewhere)

RAID 0 is still nice if you want to combine two drives into one logical drive, and RAID 1 is great for protecting data. Just don't expect a huge increase in speed with entry-level cards. I had two 7200 rpm ATA 100 drives in RAID 0 on an inexpensive Highpoint card, and the performance increase wasn't exciting. My write speeds were good, by my reads were about the same as a single drive.

Caxus

I had two 7200 rpm ATA 100 drives in RAID 0 on an inexpensive Highpoint card, and the performance increase wasn't exciting.

This is exactly why i thought it was better to go with actual SATA drives when setting up a RAID array. I was under the impression that SATA maximized the gains you get from RAID in general.

Also, the drives that Best Buy has on sale are the 80 gig ST380013A-RK's for $39.99 after a $50 mail in rebate. Its funny because i checked that model on new egg and they sell it for $101 which is actually $32 more than they sell the 80 gig SATA's i was going to buy from them.

Is there something about this model that somehow makes it better than those SATA's?

Justin

If you go with TWO 10k drives, you should notice a difference but honestly, that sounds like a good deal at Best Buy, I would go for that if I were you. That is just my opinion though...

Caxus

Nevermind about that price difference. I was comparing retail to OEM. But still, even the OEM ST380013A-RK is a few bucks more than the SATA which i thought was supposed to be faster.

Caxus

This whole RAID business has got to be the topic with the most conflicting information that i've ever researched. I'm getting people who say it really speeds things up and that they installed windows xp in 8 minutes. I'm getting people who post links to tests that show it doesn't do anything. So much conflicting information on both sides i honestly can't tell if its even worth doing.





How much does buffer size matter? My current Hard drive has a 2mb buffer and these $40 ones have an 8mb buffer. I'm starting to wonder if the best bang for my buck would be to just ditch the whole Raid idea and grab just one of those hard drives for size and performance increase (if going from 2mb to 8mb buffer is a performance increase).

Tex

The newer drives with 8mb cache are faster. I have a number of the 8mb cache maxtors. And your correct that tons of conflicting info exists for raid-0 setups and the amount of performance increase you can expect to achieve in real life situations. Unfortunately benchmarks do not always accurately reflect real life performance. What performance are you trying improve exactly?

Tex

red777

can i put 2 dvdrw on 1 cable so i can use them both at once

Tex

you can but they would work faster/better on seperate channels