Raid 0 and performance

[PeterBateman]

I think i want to setup my first raid
most likely going with 2 drives maxtor 300gig 16mb buffer because ther are on sale $80 each at fry's fry's ad
question 1? does increasing the number of drives increase performance in raid 0? if i go with three drives will that be "faster" then 2? Is a three drive raid 0 possible?

I am doing this just for performance because currently have a maxtor 160gig 8mb buffer that is slow, I dont really know its slow but in benchmarks such as pcmark05 i am way down in the hard drive side of things.

I know raptors might help but for the price/per gig i am just not sure.And i missed the dell-raptor deal and dont think it will be back anytime soon.Also I dont need 600gb at least i dont think so. are there any other options $200-250 budget.

Thanks.

 

[JohnWeldt]

Lol you could read the other threads but yes raid0 will help. I have been posting on this matter for a while.

How much speed depends on what you are doing. I noticed a considerable difference in media encoding. File transfers are better. Non linear editing and viewing is exceptional with raid0 but raid5 should do the same thing. But this is not a night and day difference and I have not gamed on the computer. Results may very.

I think two drive is the standard for RAID0. No clue about 3 or more but in that case I would go RAID.

In theory the 16MB cache will help with many small file moving and raid0 will will help with large files. So you maybe getting best of both worlds. I have not tried this yet.

Things to think about are:
Does your motherboard have a RAID controller. If not and you use software you will loose 3-8% CPU to run the raid.
Quality of drives
Money to performance ratio (better ratio on ram or CPU)
Drive failure, one dies you loose it all


Note that all of this is my opinion and open for discussion. Hope it helps.

 

[maury73]

You can connect any number of drives in RAID0/1/5 array, provided they are all the same size (preferable the same identical HDD).
You will notice big performance increase only if you do video encoding, or acess very big files (abose 100MB). For all other applications where low latency is more important RAID0 will not provide enhancement, on the contrary, access times usually raise up.

 

[choirbass]

for raid 0, performance scales fairly well (3 drives will be faster than 2)... you can add as many drives as you want, with the smallest sized drive being the maximum size that can be used of any other drive (eg. you have an 80 gig drive, and a 60 gig drive, both set up in the same raid 0 array, both drives will then be only 60 gigs, and the other remaining 20 wont show up)... depending on what storage controller you have can affect raid performance too... as far as slow performance with your existing drive, make sure you dont have any unnecessary programs or processes running, that its defragged, no viruses or other malware on the drive... the pitfalls of raid 0 though, mainly is that its not redundant at all, so if one drive happens to fail, for whatever reason... then the data from all the other drives in the array will fail to work, a benefit of it however, is speed, of course, and the more drives you add, the larger the array will show up as a single drive (the 60 and 80 gig hard drives i mentioned earlier, will then show up as a 120 gig drive)... also, if you do decide to go with raid 0, make sure you frequently back up your data, to cds, or an extra hard drive, or anywhere else aside from the raid 0 array (even if you decide not to go with raid 0, backing up data on a regular basis is something that should be done anyhow)

 

[Synergy6]

only if you do video encoding, or acess very big files (abose 100MB).

Personally, I would call a file "very big" when it's "abose" (sic) 5GB. But yes, RAID 0 speeds up data transfer instead of latency.
Synergy6

 

[PeterBateman]

as far as slow performance with your existing drive, make sure you dont have any unnecessary programs or processes running, that its defragged, no viruses or other malware on the drive... the pitfalls of raid 0 though, mainly is that its not redundant at all, so if one drive happens to fail, for whatever reason... then the data from all the other drives in the array will fail to work, a benefit of it however, is speed, of course, and the more drives you add, the larger the array will show up as a single drive ... also, if you do decide to go with raid 0, make sure you frequently back up your data, to cds, or an extra hard drive, or anywhere else aside from the raid 0 array (even if you decide not to go with raid 0, backing up data on a regular basis is something that should be done anyhow)

Thanks everyone with the superquick reply's

my current setup (gaming surfing) is pretty new also virus free i dont think its slow nor does it feel laggy (its just a bechmark thing showing me that i am slow) i am kind of hope-ing {sp ?} that after the raid setup i would be able to tell that it was slow.

maury73 Now you've done it, how do acess times with raid 0 work?

I have a asus p5wd2-e so going to use its raid, well i was not worried about data loss because i have 1 hard drive now if it goes down i lose all the data as well. i will be wiiling to consider a raid 0 setup as a single hard drive just 2pcs. (maybe i should consider (raid) it as a more "fragile" hard drive?) Another reason i dont worry about failing is because i burn to cd/dvd everything important it also the same reason i dont need 600gb.