RAID 5 good for gaming?

[vyder]

Hi guys, I am thinking about upgrading my computer and currently I have a raid 5 setup. I am looking to get a raptor x drive which should improve my gaming performance. I have read that raid 0 is the best setup for gaming but wanted to know how effective raid 5 is.

thanks guys, take care.

 

[spaztic7]

This is a good question. Can you stripe raid 5? If so, then I think it would be fine and you get the added security if one drive fails. I do think it would be strange running a stripe cofiguration over 3 drives though.....

 

[chunkymonster]

This is a good question. Can you stripe raid 5? If so, then I think it would be fine and you get the added security if one drive fails. I do think it would be strange running a stripe cofiguration over 3 drives though.....

spaztic7 - Please read this wiki on RAID5.



To the OP - check out the RAID Scaling Charts, Part 1 & Part2 here at THG. Given that gaming requires a fast burst and read speed and not so much emphasis on write speeds, they can offer some insight to the read/write speeds for both RAID0 and RAID5 so you can make a comparison and determine what would work best for you.

 

[spaztic7]

spaztic7 - Please read this wiki on RAID5.

That was a piss poor read. All I needed was a simple yes or no. It would have been easier to say yes or no then have to go to wiki and find that. Now we both wasted time on this... I had to read it and you had to post it.....

 

[chunkymonster]

That was a piss poor read. All I needed was a simple yes or no. It would have been easier to say yes or no then have to go to wiki and find that. Now we both wasted time on this... I had to read it and you had to post it.....

The intent was to get you to read it and *hopefully* have you gain a better understanding of what RAID5 is and how it works. Asking if you can stripe RAID5, c'mon. You read the wiki, therefore, it was/is not a waste of my time.

 

[spaztic7]

The intent was to get you to read it and *hopefully* have you gain a better understanding of what RAID5 is and how it works. Asking if you can stripe RAID5, c'mon. You read the wiki, therefore, it was/is not a waste of my time.

I did read it... I knew how it worked but I was not sure if it was only striped or if they also give an option to just add them togeather (jobod with protection).

At least we can both agree that Robot Chicken is a good show. Even though family guy did a better starwars episode.

 

[chookman]

You can do a nested raid 5 in a raid 0 or commonly known as RAID5+0 although this is getting a little excentric for a gaming partition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

 

[UncleDave]

You can do a nested raid 5 in a raid 0 or commonly known as RAID5+0 although this is getting a little excentric for a gaming partition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

Man this is getting misguided - I thought 42 RAID levels was enough......

 

[ausch30]

If your using software RAID you will will see a performance decrease due to processor overhead, the best way to run RAID 5 is with a dedicated RAID controller. RAID 0 is the best for gaming and if you have a RAID 0 array with your games on it and a seperate drive for storage you will get the best results. Since you are currently using RAID 5 I would think going to a Raptor might slightly improve performance but your CPU will still be doing the parity calculations so your performance will suffer.

 

[airblazer]

Simple answer? NO.

Best raid for gaming is stripe raid..raid 0
Information is spanned across two hard drivers..however and here's the catch..if one h/d dies you lose everything..
Way I do it is just the OS/games/apps on the raid 0, all backup such as docs,app installers, game iso's etc are all on another raid 1 array which is mirroring..each hard h/d is a exact copy of each other.

 

[gwolfman]

Hi guys, I am thinking about upgrading my computer and currently I have a raid 5 setup. I am looking to get a raptor x drive which should improve my gaming performance. I have read that raid 0 is the best setup for gaming but wanted to know how effective raid 5 is.

thanks guys, take care.

How many hard disks will you have in the RAID? If you only have two, then you're limited to RAID 0 since RAID 5 needs 3 or more drives. Using the two pictures provided below (from tom's raid scaling charts), it looks like 2 drives in RAID 0 ~= 3 drives in RAID 5. So it looks like ::: [# disks] RAID0 ~= [# disks + 1] RAID5. If you can afford the extra disk, I think it's worth the security benefit.

 

[vyder]

wow thanks for the responses. in terms of reads, the previous post shows some great info and looks like I will stick to raid 5 for gaming as i currently have a raid 5 setup (which gives me that extra data security). the difference isnt that much off to warrant me not protecting my data, although raid is expensive :S. i have a 3ware raid card and it works great! ok that's settled, thanks again guys. i know raid 5 suffers from writes though. do most games write heavily to the HDD?

take care.

 

[vgdarkstar]

Nobody considered the latency of RAID arrays, with a controller RAID 0 is the way to go, but with only 2, maybe 3 drives, once you go over that the latency will start to affect the performance (since gaming relies on small to medium sized files to transfer)

RAID 5 with 3 drives will give you about the same read/write bandwidth as RAID 0, but more latency, which translates into average performance less than that of RAID 0.

Another question would be if you are using an onboard controller or a dedicated RAID controller, as said before this will affect the performance, especially in the latency department.

 

[vgdarkstar]

Nobody considered the latency of RAID arrays, with a controller RAID 0 is the way to go, but with only 2, maybe 3 drives, once you go over that the latency will start to affect the performance (since gaming relies on small to medium sized files to transfer)

RAID 5 with 3 drives will give you about the same read/write bandwidth as RAID 0, but more latency, which translates into average performance less than that of RAID 0.

Another question would be if you are using an onboard controller or a dedicated RAID controller, as said before this will affect the performance, especially in the latency department.

 

[sawi0024]

OMG, THIS IS GETTING WAY TO CONFUSING...

I have a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering which is basically Computer Engineering... there are my credentials, what are yours?

Three drives in RAID 5 will smoke two drives in raid 0, why?

In RAID 5, the parity burden is distributed equally across all three drives, but all three drives still have the data that you are trying to read. Therefore, a RAID 5 is like RAID 0 except the hdd will skip over the parity information.

Parity calculations only happen upon writing to the disc, video games don't write to discs except for a tiny little bit of info when you save your game.

Plus, an additional 500GB hdd can be had for $60 on newegg.com. How much time would it take you to reinstall you OS and reinstall all the games and download all the software that obtained illegally all over again? It's worth the extra money especially when these newer SATA hdd have failure rates around 3% annually.

OH, and now to talk about software supported RAID 5... The game you are running is a single core game! it does not take advantage of your quad core, sorry but it doesn't. Windows XP multithreads. This means that it will distribute it's load of programs across your processors. You can even manual decide what applications will run on which processor. So, put your game on core 0 and everything else including your raid software on core 1. Oh, also did you forget the fact that your hard drive will only really be used when you are loading up a level? From then on the game is running directly off of your memory, not to mention that parity calculations only happen upon a write.

 

[Translucency]

sawi0024 is totally right! For reading, RAID5 offers the same potential as RAID0 does. Unlike RAID4 as sawi pointed out, RAID5 has all parity data distributed over all drive members. This means that for reading, all drives can used for reading without ever touching parity data or calculating any. For writing however, one virtual drive is sacrificed since it has to write parity data; so you have a theoretical performance limit of a RAID0 array with one disk less. So if a RAID0-array of 3 disks can write 180MB/s, a RAID5-array of 4 disks can do about the same assuming the driver is 100% efficient.

However, many people forget that when talking about RAID there is the theory and the reality. The reality is that RAID drives do not fully utilize the performance potential RAID offers. A good example is RAID1: it could also read just as fast and potentially even faster than a RAID0-array, but many drivers will only have the read performance of a single disk or slightly above that (round-robin). Some more advanced drivers like geom_mirror can however utilize the read potential of RAID1 with load-balancing schemes.

So when we are talking about RAID-performance, we talk about the performance of a specific implementation of that RAID-level. So don't get mislead by the "RAID0" and "RAID5" tags on the Toms Hardware screens; it should say "Areca ARC-1220 RAID0" or "JMicron RAID0" instead. In the screenshots, it can be seen very clearly that the specific RAID engine used did not scale beyond 380MB/s or 5 disks in RAID0. Software RAID might have done a much better job. This is Windows software RAID for example:

Does a much better job than the scores in the THG screenies, and this is just Software RAID0 function of Windows with the drives connected to the onboard SATA controller. Ofcourse, IOps performance is more important than throughput, so this 500MB/s array might still be busted by an SSD which can only do 200MB/s in real-life benchmarks.

I've yet to see a software RAID5 driver for windows that does a good job. Linux and especially BSD already can provide high RAID5 performance but for windows the drivers are in pretty bad shape. Most do not support write buffering so have piss poor write throughput and they may also have reliability issues, issues which can cause undetected corruption or inability to access the data.

Therefore, i'm somewhat sceptical to suggesting RAID5 for gamers. Buy an SSD! Its going to make much more sense, since SSDs rock in terms of IOps performance, especially if you're getting a good one, like this:

*drool* up to 2TB of SSD storage with internal RAID5 with BBU and DRAM write-back buffer, and PCI-express x8 interface. Gives you around 1300MB/s or so, and a bunch more IOps. =)