Hard Drives and RAID

Status
Not open for further replies.

harry18

Daemon Poster
Messages
823
so on my new comp im thinkin of a raid setup, how much of a speed increase is there, say over a 10k hdd, and how likely is it that a raid 0 will fail, and if it does, do you need to reformat the whole hdd setup? also, ive deen seeing some hdds with sata 2? is that faster than regular sata or somthing...thanks
 
RAID is meant to increase access time in RAID0 but with this the amount of hdd you have is the amount of times you are likley to have one fail and lose all data (e.g. RAID0 with 2 hdd is 2x more likely, with 4 hdd it is 4x more likley.)

Boot time will increase due to having to go through RAID setups each time, may take 10 seconds longer max probabally. I personally wouldn't have either a RAID array or a 10k hdd just give me a single bigger one.

SATA 2 has twice the bandwidth but in reality isn't faster. Still go with a SATA2 hdd.
 
harry18 said:
so on my new comp im thinkin of a raid setup, how much of a speed increase is there, say over a 10k hdd, and how likely is it that a raid 0 will fail, and if it does, do you need to reformat the whole hdd setup? also, ive deen seeing some hdds with sata 2? is that faster than regular sata or somthing...thanks
how much speed increase? well, 2 x 7200RPM drives in a Raid 0 perform about the same as 1 x 10,000RPM drive

how likely is a raid 0 to fail?
that depends on a number of things:
hard drive quality
whether it is a hardware or software raid (hardware is much more reliable)
what conditions you run your hard drives in (heat = bad)

SATA II does not give a big advantage over SATA. yes, the transfer speed is faster. but the drives themselves currently read and write to the disk at the same rate as their normal SATA counterparts. the only speed increase really occurs in very short bursts, where the cache is being used a lot.
 
hmm, yea, you dont show it in a very good light, thanks chaps, i havent noticed a huge speed increse with my 10k hdd, so i think ill just get a bog standard hdd, thanks

ok say i have 200£ (370$) to burn, what is the best hdd set up?
 
Trifid said:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Seagate_191.html 500gb for just over, otherwise 400gb for £140 (better value IMO.)
2 x 250GB is about £70 less

anyway, a hardware raid just means you have a physical raid controller chip which controls the RAID array. a lot of new motherboards come with a RAID controller

software RAId means that the OS or another piece of software controls the RAID array. software is a lot more volatile, and things go wrong much easier on software.
so a hardware controlled RAID is much more reliable
 
That will equate to a single 500 gig drive in RAID 0. I have done that on an intel system and I have so many progrmas installed my program menu in startup has a second page........only 18% of the drive is used!!! So, when I built my gamer system I used two 36 gig raptors in RAID 0 with a 100 gig Sata Backup drive. My system is now as fast as any SCSI server. OMG! What a difference Raptors make in RAID 0. BTW...sorry but just because you add drives to RAID doesn't double the potential failure rate etc. That is totally illogical and not supported by any drive manufactureres statistical assessments of RAID drive failure issues and it is a totally easy issue to overcome....2 SATA dives in RAID 0 witht he third in RAID 5. :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom