Single 750gig vs 2x500 Raid 0

[mwe056]

So here is the deal.. I'm going to get a new Hp 9600t
quad Core i7-975 Extreme Edition @3.33GHz
Vista 64 Bit
8 gig DDR3 1066 MHz Ram
1GB ATI Radeon HD 4850
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

I'm going to be playing some games but the bulk of the of the hard work will be from copying of dvd/Blue ray movies to the hard drive for permanent storage and play back to my tv. I will be doing a lot of multi tasking in the process of recording AND playback of the movies(kids watching movies from the compuer on the tv while i'm doing other work on it. Or 1 kid watching a movie while one is playing an online game)

So here is the basic question... From a performance stand point, would I be just as well off staying with a single a single SATA 750 gig 3gb/s drive or spending the extra $$$ to have it set up as a 1 TB Raid 0 2x500 for "performance"? Data Back up will be on an external or third drive. I haven't decided yet.

I have read in a numerous blogs over the past couple of days (and the countless hrs that it took) that that gave me some good basic knowledge on how the Raid set ups work but didn't seem to really apply to my application. Hp didn't offer a Raid 1+0 or 0+1 option so that is out until a later date when I learn more about it and can set it up myself ($$$).

Any advice you guys can offer up would be greatly appreciated. Lag is not an option.

 

[jrst]

Start with a single 750GB drive. When you have an understanding of where the performance issues are--if any, and if warranted--then consider a more complex storage architecture.

I'd guess the bottleneck won't be the disk xfer rate (which is what RAID-0 buys you), but that multi-tasking of the sort you describe (ripping movies, playing movies, playing games, other work) simultaneously--even with a i7-975 and even with RAID-0--won't meet your expectations. Specifically, Vista is not a server OS, and under high loads of whatever sort (CPU or IO), someone will lose.

I'd also guess that instead of a that big rig i7-975/Vista system trying to be all things to everyone, you'd be better off with a 920 or 940, and spend the difference on a cheap HTPC rig (e.g., ION or similar) devoted to TV duty, with your core system serving data to it over the network.

In short, if you're justifying that big rig based on the assumption that they--specifically, the spouse and kids--don't need anything else, I'd tread very carefully, and leave a bit in reserve

 

[jitpublisher]

+1 there ^. Sounds like you would be better off with 2 lesser systems, which would each do their job better than the 1 expensive system you are planning on buying will do trying to do 2 or more things at once. You are paying a RIDICULOUS, simply obscene amount of money for that extreme i7, you could buy/assemble an HTPC machine for less money than you are paying for the processor alone!

 

[RetiredChief]

I just bought 2 WD 640 blacks. Did a short stroke 400 Gig strip for Op sys and programs plus a small partition for "Small Data" files. The remainder of the HD I selected a larger stripe and a larger cluster size (Formating) for large files (such as dot.vob/video files.

2 of the newer Seagate -12 500 gig drive might be an excellent choice.

My Son just got a 3 gig usb HDD to put his DVD's on. (uses two 1.5 Tbyte drives in Raid0 conf.) So far he has copied about 500 DVD's on to it and it is over 2/3 filled. He still has a lot to go. He enters the ECN Nr from the dvd and it don't loads the jacket.

Here are a couple of discussions on Raid 0 for newer drives, for some added info and alternative inputs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum1.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=33&page=1&subcat=0&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&moderation=0&new=0&nojs=0

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=32&post=249993&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

 

[jrst]

RetiredChief -- Instead of using synthetic benchmarks, you might try the built-in Windows performance monitoring tools (computer management -> performance monitoring; the exact path depends on which version of Windows you're using), and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx

I think you'll find after looking at real-world behavior (at least for typical workstation/app/games), that disk accesses are far more localized--except for transients (e.g., app loading/startup) and maybe some naughty background tasks--and that there's a lot less disk activity than most people think (assuming you have a reasonable amount of memory and you aren't flogging the disks paging).

All of which is one reason why SSD's (or RAID-0, or whatever) don't translate into nearly as great a performance improvement as the raw/synthetic numbers might suggest. Thought exercise: (a) Assume disk access time is zero, and xfer rate is infinite. (b) For any given workload, determine the performance improvement. Shorter version: determine the amount of time the system spends waiting on the disk (seek+xfer); subtract that time (i.e., assume it is zero); what is the net gain?

 

[sub mesa]

On Linux you can see the IOwait percentage, either in text or graph. This is very useful. If the IOwait is 90% for example, the CPU could be running at full capacity but can't because its constantly waiting for data on the disk. Normally the IOwait is zero when there is no activity. If you go start an application you will see it rise quickly, as the whole system is just running at 10% of its capacity, the disk is the major bottleneck. And its not MB/s but IOps that make a difference here, and latencies.

 

[Pointertovoid]

I also believe copying from slow blue-ray and rendering is no heavy load for an Hdd, even if highly paralleled, so don't add the worries of a Raid.

About 750GB: I've just seen that Hitachi's 750GB in the 7K1000.B series (Hdt721075sla etc) went from 2 platters to 3 with the corresponding loss of performance.