Which HD setup to go with

[Buhatma]

Hi,
I'm in the process of upgrading my hard drives. My question is which drive setup should I go with. Main uses for the computer will be Audio/Visual Work, Gaming.
Option 1.
2 x WD Raptors running in Raid 0
Option 2.
1 x WD Raptor - System Drive
2 x WD 80 GB SE Drives runing Raid 0

Current system specs are 2.4C @ 3.0, Asus p4p800 Deluxe, 2 x 512 Corsair pc3200, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 x WD Raptor. Thanks in advance.

 

[lunitic]

Raid 0 = disaster waiting to happen. What are you going to do if one of the raptors fails?

option 1: the fastest option. For disk access that is, but for most applications including audio/visual disk access isn't the bottleneck. If one drive fails the whole Raid 0 array fails, including all your data and your system. Also there is relatively little disk space.

Option 2: Much more disk space but less disk performance. At least when a drive fails only the system or the data is lost.

Do you really need the performance of a raid 0 system? I mean, it is nice to boot in 45 secs instead of 55, or to encode your mpeg2 video in 3 hrs instead of 3.5, but it is not essential... If it is essential, is your budget so tight that you cannot afford redundancy (in the form of RAID 0+1 for example)? Or is your data and system availability that unimportant?

 

[Buhatma]

Thank you for the quick response. My data is very important as it is what i will be getting paid for doing. Money is no object as far as data security is concerned. So maybe runing a 4 disk setup in Raid 0+1 would be good?

 

[lunitic]

Depends. Raid 1+0 gives you both striping and mirroring and therefore good redundancy and performance. But there are more options (as always ;-)
for example:
Raid 1 only. Faster than single disk but not as fast as raid 0. Excellent redundancy. (in fact, it's what I use. I find it fast enough. One big advantage is that I can take any of the mirrored drives and mount them on any standard IDE channel.)
Raid 5. Much the same as mirroring, but it has a better drive space efficiency when using more than 2 drives. You cant access the drives without a RAID controlller.
No raid at all: create a backup partition of all your partitions on different drives.

Now keep in mind that RAID doesn't offer you complete security. Data will get lost by other means, like human error, fire, power problems, burglary, viruses, bugs, etc etc etc. You need a good system availability and backup strategy.

 

[sjonnie]

The OS mostly consists of very many small files so random read rate (and command queing and ordering if you have SCSI) is more important than overall disk throughput. RAID0 gives best performance increases when working with large files in continuous read/writes so isn't necessarily a good thing for loading the OS (although may improve the speed of loading large game files).

My data is very important as it is what i will be getting paid for doing. Money is no object as far as data security is concerned

Then you need to ask yourself how much data you are going to have, what sort of access do you need to it (fast reads or fast writes or neither), how CPU intensive a RAID system do you think you can support, and how much money do you have available to backup your data (saying it is no object is nonsense).

A decent system that doesn't require fast writes would be a RAID5 array with tape backup. If you need faster writes then go to RAID10 with 6 or 8 disks. Data security is higher in RAID10 (the more pairs you have, the higher the security) than RAID5 (or RAID0+1) so you could also consider loosing the tape.

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[Vapor]

I would recommend getting something based on Option 2. Get the Raptor as a system drive and three 80s in a RAID5 config. Generally the same performance (some characteristics are slower, others are faster) as Raid0 if you have a good controller (promise makes good ones) but also parity...which is great for security. If you want more speed and space, go up to 4+ discs, but this will reduce security (1 out of the 4 drives is 4/3 as probable to break as 1 out of the 3 drives). RAID5 cannot sustain multiple disc failures.

BTW, do you have a mobo that has SATA? or dual RAID on your motherboard? to the best of my knowledge there are VERY FEW (if any) PCI cards that provide dual RAID (you would need two RAIDs, RAID5[3x80s] and JBOD[Raptor])

RDRAM = ENEMY