Raid - is it worth it?

[Agent]

Cos it the array kept dying! 6 failures in 12 months across 3 computers.

It's enough to put any one off!

A failure every 2 months across 3 systems implys that there was something else wrong. RAID in itself is not an unstable technology.

[SiM]

Having tried raid 0 for a couple of years with general non-gaming use, my opinion is that the small speed gain is not worth the risk. I realised this when one drive died... I suppose that teaches me not to take double risk with maxtors

Next time I will probably try either solid state, or single raptors or raid 5 with hardware card... or maybe raptors in raid 5

[BUFF]

Not aimed at you Buff () - but thats a crappy article. No benchmarks, all POV, nothing to back up what's been said....[Could have gone to wikipedia for the same info]

fits in with my experience/views though.
& I'm sure that Anandtech had one with similar conclusions.

"unless you’re doing some pretty hardcore graphics, audio or video work, the performance potential of RAID doesn’t mean much."
I guess that you fall under this as being hardcore

[Agent]

fits in with my experience/views though.
& I'm sure that Anandtech had one with similar conclusions.

"unless you’re doing some pretty hardcore graphics, audio or video work, the performance potential of RAID doesn’t mean much."
I guess that you fall under this as being hardcore

Oh it fits in with mine too, don't get me wrong. But if someone is going to do an article with a "conclusion" on what RAID is good for, it needs to have results to prove it.

As it stands, its just reiterating what everyone has known about RAID for the last 5 years.

[mrt9888]

Is it possible to mix different brands; I have 320gb 7200.10 and a WD equivalant same specs? and is this xfx card http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=225506 better than onboard RAID on P965 boards?

[GSte]

I love my raptor... far less hassle than raid and noticeably faster than my original 7200rpm sata drive, with the afore-mentioned lower risk of data loss. The argument about which is faster will rage forever I reckon, there is some evidence for both in different circumstances. I hear a lot that Raptors are very noisy, but I can't say I've ever noticed it for it to be a problem. Perhaps if it's sat on your desk rather than in a case or you are particularly concerned about lack of noise...? You can get noise dampening caddies now I think though, made by Scythe IIRC.....

[badass]

2 Normal RAID 0 drives are faster than a single Raptor <----End of.

LOL at patronising statement thats actually incorrect.
1 Raptor can be faster depending on the type of data access required.
For random access, a Raptor will be faster. For sequential access, 2 modern, normal drives in RAID0 will be faster.

[ikonia]

There is no benifit to the naked eye, even less due to the fact that this is home PC kit not enterprise level kit. Most "raid" is controlled by a software driver in the OS so the performance people get is either from kit with reall &#163;&#163; invested and highly utilised disk - or its in their head.

The slightest issue on the file system or one of the disks and your machine is worthless - repair or re-install time.

people will quite fantasy figures at you and boast that it makes windows boot in 2 seconds and games load in miliseconds etc etc, bottom line is for %99.9 of the home users the only raid worth doing is 1 for important data or a highly available workstation, or raid5 for mas storage on home / small business machines.

I'm sure people will be along shortly with the fanstasty figures and nano-second improvments, but it really doesn't matter.

[Agent]

Bottom line - Its all down to the apps you use.
If you are bottlenecked by the HD's, then RAID will help. The majority of people are not though.

TMost "raid" is controlled by a software driver in the OS so the performance people get is either from kit with reall &#163;&#163; invested and highly utilised disk - or its in their head.

The slightest issue on the file system or one of the disks and your machine is worthless - repair or re-install time.

You dont need &#163;&#163;&#163; / Hardware kit though to get good results. There is nothing wrong with software RAID provided the drivers are solid (like any other bit of hardware really).

A simple example. Take a several GB file (common in video editing) and duplicate it to the same drive, with and without RAID 0. This is where it shines.
Put that into practice where several apps are accessing / writing big files constantly and the benefits are obvious.

[arthurleung]

RAID-5 will take a huge performance hit, especially in write performance. Even on a lot of proper hardware cards.

Don't underestimate the high end RAID cards, they can easily pull a 300MB/s write speed

I had a hdd failure 2 weeks ago and it only took 2.5 hours to rebuild! (4x300G)

Depends on what you encode, Xvid / Divx / x264 rarely use any IO (highly CPU intensive).

[Lucio]

A failure every 2 months across 3 systems implys that there was something else wrong. RAID in itself is not an unstable technology.

Well yes and no, because the failure WAS the RAID controller. Everytime it blew you lost all your data, including the recovery partition so helpfully installed in place of CD's....

I'd be dubious about any technology that means the physical hard drives can't be read on their own.

[Thorsson]

Well yes and no, because the failure WAS the RAID controller. Everytime it blew you lost all your data, including the recovery partition so helpfully installed in place of CD's....

I'd be dubious about any technology that means the physical hard drives can't be read on their own.

So what was the make of this dodgy RAID controller (so no-one else buys one)?

[ed^chigliak]

I'm in the "for home use it doesn't really matter camp" and so much so I would buy a mainboard without raid to save a few more ££. Why invest any more money than is absolutely neccessary in hardware when the rate technological change puts everything you just bought out-of-date in less than 2 years and maybe even 12 months. Raid 0 will save you a few seconds at increased risk of failure and raid 1 isn't really a backup. Raid 1 won't save the day when your house is burgled or burnt down. Just a thought.

[kungpo]

I think some are missing the point here. OK - RAID0 is not perfect. BUT, you have to think of it as one drive, not two. In a single disk system you are buggered if the disk fails. So you are with RAID0. The overhead on the system is so marginal that isn't going to be an issue, and the performance gains are real, depending on what you do. Big games (ie Flight Sim X) load massively faster. You can't argue that reading (and writing) from two disks at the same time is not going to give an improvement.

It also can provide a cheaper way of getting larger storage (ie 2x smallerGB is probably cheaper than 1x largerGB HD).

And backup is a separate issue, and how many people really backup all their data anyway? With disks getting to 750gb and 1tb anyway, backing up becomes close to impossible, especially for those with massive multi-media collections.

[Supershanks]

Enter The Matrix: Slice out and get the best part from your hard drives is well worth a look. what many raptor fans forget to mention is the noise, i know 2 or 3 people who have got rid of raptors because of that. Must admit i'm a fan of intel's raid implementation, far better imo than the nvidia i'd dabbled with on nforce 4.

[GSte]

I think some are missing the point here. OK - RAID0 is not perfect. BUT, you have to think of it as one drive, not two. In a single disk system you are buggered if the disk fails. So you are with RAID0.

But in RAID0 there are two disks, which increases the chance of failure....?