raid or not

[me1234]

i have an amd x2 3800+, k8n sli platinum, 7800gt from leadtek, 1gb ddr400 corsair xms c2pt 2.3.3.6.1T and 2 wd 250gb harddrives sata2 (JS model) if i use them in raid 0 will i faster transfers and access time? i use this comp mostly for gaming and video editing, also p2p file transfer. if one of the drives fails will it ruin all the data (500gb)? is it worth it? i dont want mirror currently im getting 55.4mb/s average read, 13.3ms access time, 168mb/s burst speed tested with hdtach 3.0.1.0

 

[clue69less]

i have an amd x2 3800+, k8n sli platinum, 7800gt from leadtek, 1gb ddr400 corsair xms c2pt 2.3.3.6.1T and 2 wd 250gb harddrives sata2 (JS model) if i use them in raid 0 will i faster transfers and access time? i use this comp mostly for gaming and video editing, also p2p file transfer. if one of the drives fails will it ruin all the data (500gb)? is it worth it? i dont want mirror currently im getting 55.4mb/s average read, 13.3ms access time, 168mb/s burst speed tested with hdtach 3.0.1.0

RAID0 is a great way to increase read & write speed but to my way of thinking, you have to have a real need to justify it. Look at it this way: it doubles the probability of having a crippling disc crash. I have my OS + apps + games on a RAID0 but the reasoning behind it is that I use the leftover partition as a temporary save area for write-intensive tasks like image and video editing. Then I move the important stuff over to a RAID1 array to have a more secure copy (copies). If my RAID0 goes down, I have my OS + apps + games on optical discs, so they can be recovered - granted it's a pain in the butt, but I've got hard copies. All I'd lose is my in-progress work product and I'm save-anal enough to pop some of that stuff over to the RAID1 every so often anyway. Live with RAID0 long enough and you will see it crash.

 

[pat]

Live with RAID0 long enough and you will see it crash.

Yeah.. 5 years with RAID0 and still have to see one array crash...

While it may happen, chances are very minimal. Most common cause is heat. Both HDD are mounted too close together and overheat. Leaving enough space between them and good case vent will probably make the array last forever.

And with just like any other hdd, RAID or not, it is always advised to have some kind of backup elsewhere on another hdd.

 

[darkstar782]

I had one RAID0 array die years ago, when I was still a newbie and had two WD drives mounted so close together with so little cooling that if i touched them they burnt my fingers.

They still lasted over a year


Now, I have 6 HDDs in my main computer, from 120gb to 400gb, from 7200RPM to 10k RPM. I have not had a drive fail on me in 4 years. I am running one RAID 0 array fro windows + crap, and one JBOD array for storage (simply because I dont care about speed on it and can extend it with new drives as i fill it.). Two 80mm fans salvaged from a dead Power supply keep them all nice and cool

 

[clue69less]

Live with RAID0 long enough and you will see it crash.

Yeah.. 5 years with RAID0 and still have to see one array crash...

While it may happen, chances are very minimal. Most common cause is heat. Both HDD are mounted too close together and overheat. Leaving enough space between them and good case vent will probably make the array last forever.

And with just like any other hdd, RAID or not, it is always advised to have some kind of backup elsewhere on another hdd.

RAID or not, no HD lasts forever.

 

[clue69less]

So stop raving about how RAID0 has more chance of failing because they don't once the environmental factor has been eliminated.

Raving? That's over the top. I'm just stating a simple statistical fact. A 2-drive RAID0 is twice as likely to fail as a single drive. Hard drives are more durable these days, no doubt about it but they will someday meet their end - it is as inevitible as death and taxes.

 

[darkstar782]

It is inevitable, but for the average home user, compared to the risk of say, a hacker formatting your drives, a virus destroying all your data, or windows just being gay and forcing you to reinstall etc, the rick of data loss due to hard disk failure is negligible, assuming adequate cooling.

RAID 0 doubles that, I agree, but to me negligible*2 = negligible.

I'm also an advocate of NOT having drives auto power down after a period of inactivity, as the heads are only rated for a certain number of landings, but thats just me

I feel that if you pick up decent drives with a 5 year warranty, and cool then adequately, and you are the sort of user that cares about performance enough to consider RAID, the chances are you'll be replacing them due to size/speed issues long before they fail anyway.

After all, the drives of us consumers face a much easier life than drives in big SQL server clusters that sit at 100% random access usage all day every day

 

[clue69less]

It is inevitable, but for the average home user, compared to the risk of say, a hacker formatting your drives, a virus destroying all your data, or windows just being gay and forcing you to reinstall etc, the rick of data loss due to hard disk failure is negligible, assuming adequate cooling.

RAID 0 doubles that, I agree, but to me negligible*2 = negligible.

I'm also an advocate of NOT having drives auto power down after a period of inactivity, as the heads are only rated for a certain number of landings, but thats just me

I feel that if you pick up decent drives with a 5 year warranty, and cool then adequately, and you are the sort of user that cares about performance enough to consider RAID, the chances are you'll be replacing them due to size/speed issues long before they fail anyway.

After all, the drives of us consumers face a much easier life than drives in big SQL server clusters that sit at 100% random access usage all day every day

You might want to check your math text because in mine, negligible*2 = negligible*2. And realize that you're talking to someone that has his home PC OS, apps and in-progress work on RAID0. Not only that, I've also had my home PC RAID0 go tits up, so you can farging preach all you want but I already know the truth, OK? I mean, I've been there. And if you run RAID0 long enough (I've been doing it since its commercial genesis) maybe you'll learn too. My losses were minimal because i learned long before to do regular backups, but that's not the point.

 

[me1234]

what if one of the drives is 7months old the other is brand new, both of them having 3year warranty also the 2 drives will be kept in front of 3 92mm fans and 3cm apart from each other. and another question how do i partition the array

 

[clue69less]

what if one of the drives is 7months old the other is brand new, both of them having 3year warranty also the 2 drives will be kept in front of 3 92mm fans and 3cm apart from each other. and another question how do i partition the array

Regardless of the warranty, just do regular backups. As the value of the data increases, be more anal about backups. Set up the array in the bios, then partition and format as normal. You can probably find specifics on your mobo manufacturer's website.

 

[unstable]

I think the best approach is to invest in an additional disk to save all of your important data. Alternatively you can conduct backups on a regular basis...but I don't know how many people really stick with this.

No matter how you want to color it, RAID0 is risky. Something that happened to me that many fail to consider is failure of the motherboard that handles the RAID. In this situation you can't just mount the disks in another computer and recover the data--unless you have a compatible raid controller.

this is why backups or an additional disk is a real good idea.

 

[KWH]

"I feel that if you pick up decent drives with a 5 year warranty, and cool then adequately, and you are the sort of user that cares about performance enough to consider RAID, the chances are you'll be replacing them due to size/speed issues long before they fail anyway. "

^^ Exactly. Also, buy the drives at the same time. Silly buying a new HD to RAID 0 with 3 year old ones. Asking for a disaster. But, as long as you do a BU.........
RAID 0 is a great way to pick up some speed. I also let my RAID stay on 24/7.

 

[clue69less]

"I feel that if you pick up decent drives with a 5 year warranty, and cool then adequately, and you are the sort of user that cares about performance enough to consider RAID, the chances are you'll be replacing them due to size/speed issues long before they fail anyway. "

^^ Exactly. Also, buy the drives at the same time. Silly buying a new HD to RAID 0 with 3 year old ones. Asking for a disaster. But, as long as you do a BU.........
RAID 0 is a great way to pick up some speed. I also let my RAID stay on 24/7.

That's a nice theory but then there's reality...

I still have my very first RAID0 and it's alive. Of course it died twice along the way. First death was a HD at about a year and 1/2 old. Power managed to recover most of the data and rebuilt the array under warranty. Of course, my Mac was in their repair shop plus in transit for 6 weeks. Second death was the controller card. Out of warranty by then and a bit pricey to repair. Since then, it's run for a long time with no problems. Good quality gear - it cost $2600 way back then if I remember right (the RAID array, not the whole Mac).

 

[KWH]

I had a RAID 0 with a few WD 2.5 GB drives many years ago. It was 3 years old when I divorced. I let the ex keep the PC and that was almost 5 years ago. She upgraded the whole pc last year and the old PC was still going. 7 years or so? Most will opt for better drives before they lose a drive, but there are NO guarantees. I've seen new HD's puke out. I just had to RMA a 1 year old WD. As always, YMMV.

 

[unstable]

I think the most important point here is, regardless of whether you are running a single disk or raid0---if you have any data that you do not want to lose, make sure you back it up.

Theoretically RAID0 is riskier than running a single disk. Especially when you take into account the raid subsystem and potential for a motherboard failure that will leave the RAID0 set unreadable unless you have a compatible raid card on hand.

Even with fault tolerant arrays there is the potential for card/mobo failure or even corrupted data. So copies of important files are a must.

 

[clue69less]

I had a RAID 0 with a few WD 2.5 GB drives many years ago. It was 3 years old when I divorced. I let the ex keep the PC and that was almost 5 years ago. She upgraded the whole pc last year and the old PC was still going. 7 years or so? Most will opt for better drives before they lose a drive, but there are NO guarantees. I've seen new HD's puke out. I just had to RMA a 1 year old WD. As always, YMMV.

I am pretty much in agreement with everything you say here. I do think there are changes a-comin'. HDs are getting so inexpensive and large that I'm expecting people to keep them around longer in the future. I see plenty of people that already are having a hard time managing all the info/data/whatever they have on a large HD and it's only half full. I mean, think about it - a decade or so ago, if you had 10GB of HD space on your home rig, that was fairly large. Nowadays, I know plenty of folks that have a few TB.

But do you really expect to need 10000 TB at home within a decade? If I keep recording and archiving TV shows and movies, I still don't expect it to get into that realm. And even if you automate acquisition, there's only so much time to interact with the media and I truly believe we've crossed the price per GB threshold over the last year. I think that means more and more HDs will be used longer - and will run till they bite the big one. That's no big deal if you're sensible about backups and I'm no where near hand-wringing, but also know that many people NEVER archive. I see fairly savvy people that copy photos to their desktop or laptop HD, then immediately delete the photos off of the camera memory chip. Not me, boss! I typically want at least two independent copies - but I learned the hard way.

 

[KWH]

I'm actually looking for large, untra-cheap DDR with LARGE Ram drives. How cool would that be? Talk about HD prices taking a dive then.

I don't see an immediate need for mega tarabyte drives for home use either, unless you're a d/l packrat, or want to keep your movie library. HD is for sure the big bottleneck in a system for now.

 

[clue69less]

I'm actually looking for large, untra-cheap DDR with LARGE Ram drives. How cool would that be?

Mega cool. I wonder just how far that technology will evolve at the consumer level... It would be great to have a 50GB RAM drive for OS + aps and, say a 10TB for other stuff. We'd be cookin' with oil then, Bubba!!!

 

[unstable]

I'm actually looking for large, untra-cheap DDR with LARGE Ram drives. How cool would that be? Talk about HD prices taking a dive then.

I don't see an immediate need for mega tarabyte drives for home use either, unless you're a d/l packrat, or want to keep your movie library. HD is for sure the big bottleneck in a system for now.

Who was that who made the RAM DISK...gigabyte? It was a PCI card that could hold 4 sticks of ram and it interfaced with SATA. That was a pretty cool concept but I think they discontinued them.

Hookup a few of those to install your OS and main apps on along with RAID1 for your data and you'd be set. As it stands I've got about 2.5 gb in program files, figure another gb for my OS. I could live with 8gb of ramdisk.

 

[KWH]

I've been looking at them for awhile, since the first gen, but the RAM is too costly and still not quite big enough. I still want one.

"We'd be cookin' with oil then, Bubba!!!"

Bring on the oil, I'm ready to do some deep frying!

 

[jap0nes]

You can try moving your pagefile to another disc, that may increase overall performance, as one disk will load apps and stuff and the other will do memory swapping.

I'd say going RAID0 is a little risky as your only storage volume. People are saying that discs last longer nowadays, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of assembly defects or something. They guarantee their disks for 5 years, that's a hell of a time, but if your drive fails they'll replace your drive, not its contents.

EDIT: you want to go RAID0 just because hdtach reported low results or because you really feel a slowdown in your system?

EDIT2: by the way... RAID1 actually increases read speed, as it reads from both discs alternatly

 

[darkstar782]

As for RAM disks....

I dont like the PCI based ones much, nor the ones based on SATA. Both PCI and SATA are far too low bandwidth for a RAM disk, SATA is only going to allow 153MiB/s or so per channel (and they normally only use 1 channel). This sort of speed can be achieved using 2 or 3 Raptors on RAID0, giving a MUCH higher total storage capacity.

PCI 33MHz 32bit maxes even lower, at 133MiB/s, and its a shared bus so thats split with all your other PCI devices. All in all these solutions seem silly to me.

You can however run a 64 bit OS and 8gb+ system Ram and use that as a Ramdisk, and have more bandwidth than you'll ever need. the problem is the data isnt battery backed up...

 

[Fungalberry]

i have an amd x2 3800+, k8n sli platinum, 7800gt from leadtek, 1gb ddr400 corsair xms c2pt 2.3.3.6.1T and 2 wd 250gb harddrives sata2 (JS model) if i use them in raid 0 will i faster transfers and access time? i use this comp mostly for gaming and video editing, also p2p file transfer. if one of the drives fails will it ruin all the data (500gb)? is it worth it? i dont want mirror currently im getting 55.4mb/s average read, 13.3ms access time, 168mb/s burst speed tested with hdtach 3.0.1.0

Yeah, RAID 0 is supposed to be faster. Just make sure you have adequate ventilation.

 

[clue69less]

I'd say going RAID0 is a little risky as your only storage volume. People are saying that discs last longer nowadays, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of assembly defects or something. They guarantee their disks for 5 years, that's a hell of a time, but if your drive fails they'll replace your drive, not its contents.

They either fail in the first few weeks(=defects) or they last over the warranty period with optimal environment.

Or lightninng gets past your UPS or your uncle pours coffee through the optical drawer and shorts your rig, or...

It's not as simple, cut and dried and either/or as you depict.

 

[RichPLS]

I have been running at least one RAID0 for 6 years (two at times) I took a break for about a year in 2004, but have had no major problems due to drive failure dropping the RAID.
They are not for everybody, I agree, but for those that think/know they are for them and are experienced plus knowledgeable their PC's, RAID's of any type are stable and quick.
As far as failure, that user would know the drives, buy and install from a good manufacturer and distributer (makes a difference), know the warranties and predicted usable lifespan replacing drive before failure becomes probable and regardless, having a regulated backup system in case of unexpected failure.
BTW, this makes your RAID foolproof...