Raptors

[tom deloford]

Of course, if you put a bottleneck in the system - like going through the PCI bus which is limited to a usable 100MB/s - it's easy to wipe out the benefit.

What bus are you using? And are you sure PCI is limited to a usable 100mb/s?

[myth]

This is what anandtech , I dunno but I think they are pretty reliable source and their setup is applicable for most users imo.

Final Words
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.

Well, let me put it to you this way... My raid busts at 200 mega bytes a second! Average read is at 72 megs... So I really dont care what andtech thinks... I own 2 and I KNOW how they preform... P.S. I hate andtech

[tom deloford]

wow you are a hexus nut, anyway you post 1 dubious looking "benchmark" and you expect me to throw aside a well layed out, comprehensive and informative report like this one. Sorry mate. You might well be correct that for video editing and stuff its worth it but for most users, i.e desktop users, gamers and prob most power users its not worth the extra cost.

ps i hate anandtech

That seems a bit ott mate.

[rajagra]

What bus are you using?

My RAIDed drives are on the dual ATA controllers connected to the nForce MCP (Media and Communications Processor / "Southbridge") which connects in turn to the 800MB/s HyperTransport. NOT through the PCI bus.

The SCSI drives are on a PCI SCSI controller.

See. It does make sense!

And are you sure PCI is limited to a usable 100mb/s?

Yes. The standard PCI 32-bit 33MHz bus has a theoretical throughput of 133MB/s (33MHz x 4 bytes.) But in practice you will only get 100MB/s of sustained throughput due to overheads.

So, if you use a PCI RAID card and connect 4 HDs, each with 60MB/s sustained transfer rate, you might hope for 240MB/s transfer but you won't get it. 100ish max.

Does that prove that RAID doesn't work? No, it proves you have to do things properly!

[tom deloford]

The raid0 setup on the anandtech review also used your setup, I didnt realise you were talking about a PCI card raid0 config, (why??, I never mentioned this..)

I think its clear that the marginal real world performance benefits (probably about 3% at the very best) are outweighed by the added cost and halving of mean failure time. I'll stick with single disk SATA thanks very much.

[rajagra]

tom deloford: "The raid0 setup on the anandtech review also used your setup"
Where does it say that? They don't mention any additional hard drive on the testbed configuration page.
When they say "the OS is located on a separate drive" you're assuming they meant a separate physical drive. I'm pretty sure they meant a different partition / drive letter on the same physical test drive. Since they don't say, we can't be sure.
EDIT> Oh, did you just mean they weren't going through PCI? If so, I'm saying that PCI is a bottleneck, not that avoiding that bottleneck guarantees fantastic RAID0 performance.

tom deloford: "I didnt realise you were talking about a PCI card raid0 config"
I wasn't. The RAID is 2 x IDE drive off the mobo. The SCSI drives are non-RAID off the PCI SCSI controller.

tom deloford: "I think its clear that the marginal real world performance benefits (probably about 3% at the very best)"
You just won't accept that some applications benefit enormously from RAID0, will you? Despite people here telling you they've tried it and it works. You've never tried it. You just read a handful of tests that failed to show the benefits, and conclude that no other system running real-world applications can possibly benefit from RAID0. Your logic is seriously flawed. It's like saying anti-cancer drugs don't always work, so if you get cancer there's no point taking them.

tom deloford: "are outweighed by the added cost"
There is no added cost. Two drives cost the same whether you RAID them or not.

tom deloford: "and halving of mean failure time."
So what? Your single drive is going to fail, anyway. You need to back up whichever option you take. Besides, most data loss is due to human error, not drive failures.

tom deloford: "I'll stick with single disk SATA thanks very much."
I'm sure you'll be very happy with it. Enjoy!

[tom deloford]

tom deloford: "I think its clear that the marginal real world performance benefits (probably about 3% at the very best)"
You just won't accept that some applications benefit enormously from RAID0, will you? Despite people here telling you they've tried it and it works. You've never tried it. You just read a handful of tests that failed to show the benefits, and conclude that no other system running real-world applications can possibly benefit from RAID0. Your logic is seriously flawed. It's like saying anti-cancer drugs don't always work, so if you get cancer there's no point taking them.

Yes I will accept that. I have said that already (....especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array) My point is (and Ill say it again just for you)for most users the overall system performance its not worth paying double the cost of a SINGLE disk solution

tom deloford: "are outweighed by the added cost"
There is no added cost. Two drives cost the same whether you RAID them or not.

Look I know its late but.. TWO DISKS COST TWICE AS MUCH AS ONE DISK! And if you have 2 disks already then u lose half of your storage so it still cost twice as much as one!

It's like saying anti-cancer drugs don't always work, so if you get cancer there's no point taking them.

ITS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE SAYING THIS.

tom deloford: "and halving of mean failure time."
So what? Your single drive is going to fail, anyway. You need to back up whichever option you take. Besides, most data loss is due to human error, not drive failures.

Granted but the point is if you have two disks for most ppl (not u, cos u use loads of programs which really benefit from RAID0) RAID1 would be more beneficial.. Also if a disk fails in RAID0 mode its much harder to recover data given the spread of data across the two disks.

[rajagra]

Two 40GB drives in RAID0 appear as a single 80GB logical array. You don't lose any capacity. But you might gain an awful lot of speed.
In Windows NT/2000/XP you can even use RAID0 without any special hardware (for data, not the boot disk.)

If you can't see by now that this is a cheap and easy way to make your PC run more snappily, you're never going to understand. Like I said, enjoy your single drive system. Those of us using RAID will enjoy ours - more.

G'night.

[Snoopafella]

Well extra the time it gives me means I can light up another cig. So actually i'll enjoy it more!

Plus I'd rather spend my money of something that will add something more finite than a few seconds less in loading times.