I am interested in getting a SATA RAID controller card for my computer so I can use 2 SATA drives in RAID 0. What I am most interested in is whether this will improve the performance of the drives at all. I have read many differing opinions on this. Some say that it doesn't affect performance at all, while others say it can give up to a 15% increase in performance.
Is there anyone here who has used RAID 0? Will it improve performance noticably over just a single disk?
Thanks in advance.
15% is definitely overegging the pudding a little; 5% possibly, but I'd query whether it's worth the risk of losing everything in your array if one of the hard disks goes.
maybe a small increase in loading speeds, and general game performance if you haven't got enough ram - and if you are swapping at all, you should have bought ram, not a RAID0 setup
remember, RAID0 is exponentially more likely to hose all your data than a single disk
Yeah, i'ver never really seen the point thb
- Keep it a two seperate disks, you then half as likely to lose half you data! (or else set it up as a raid1)
- And if you are short of ram, you'd be much better of to get somemore, rather than a raid card!
Daniel
Sigh.Guess I better put forward the other side of the story.
You'll find that 90% of people who rubbish RAID0 have never tried it.
You'll also find that 90% of people who HAVE tried it love it, and carry on using it whenever possible.
Try it for yourself, but ideally NOT on a PCI card. They are limited to 133MB/s or less (more like 100MB/s). Two modern drives will exceed that throughput. A motherboard with on-board RAID is much better.
And can we clear up one thing with a cold, hard fact? Two drives in RAID0 can be UP TO twice as fast as a single drive. Not 15% faster. Not 5% faster. But 100% faster. That is THE theoretical upper limit. And for SOME applications it IS achievable.
Overall PC performance will not double (you wouldn't expect it to, would you?)
And sometimes RAID0 will not give any speed increase at all (might even be a bit slower!)
But trust me. Those occasions when it kicks in and makes a difference make it all worthwhile. Benchmarks just don't reveal the benefits. But using it will make it obvious.
Try it and judge for yourself.
Last edited by rajagra; 21-06-2005 at 08:15 PM.
DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLI-D; AMD64 3500+ Winchester ;
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Yeah I think I will have a go. However I will probably have to go for a PCI card, I can't quite afford a new motherboard.
Are there any makes/models I should go for or stay away from?
I'd guess I'm one of the 10%, then, since up until recently my workstation at work was RAID0, and I can say that it made little to no perceptible difference to boot time, little to no perceptible difference when in general use, and I'd say that balancing any minor performance gain against the possible loss of everything on the striped partition, then the game isn't worth the candle. If you want to try it, then go ahead. Either take regular backups of everything on the stripe set, or ensure that nothing valuable's on it to start with. I don't know what drives you want to use, but if it were me, I'd bung the OS on it plus applications (since you can always just reinstall those). Adaptec do nice bootable PCI RAID controllers; the 1210SA supports bootable arrays and supports two SATA drives and handles RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. The 1200A will support bootable arrays of IDE disks.
Last edited by nichomach; 21-06-2005 at 11:56 PM.
you'll gain very little from a cheap PCI controller - your host CPU does all the dirty work. an expensive (3ware) card won't touch your cpu, but isn't cheap.Originally Posted by m3trj
Noticed a lot more difference from upgrading my primary disk than going RAID tbh.
I've been using Raid0 for 6 months using native controller on a A7n8x ASUS, ie. 2x 160g sata. Things are very stable, for normal use I don't think I see any real performance advantage. Loading times might be fractionally quicker, boot up times are the same once you put a load of crap on the drives. I will say that transfering large files and installing software is much, much quicker (windows xp took less than estimated 25 mins).
My next re-install I will revert back (to 2 drives) and see how things pan out. I was expecting good things from raid 0 but unless you have a dedicated card I'm not so sure it's worth it. Never had a problem with it but......
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
I've had several RAID 0 setups, as I actually use the benifits it provides (video recording).
Don't expect access time to improve, don't expect loading times to improve much, don't expect boot time to shorten drastically, don't expect to see a big difference with general use.
DO expect file transfers (reads and writes) to be far faster.
It doesn't change the perfromance of the drives in the slightest, it does increase the perfromance of the volume(s) on the drives significantly.
They benchmark a LOT faster, those programs WILL show 80+ mb/s transfer rates etc. In the real world though, how often do drives fail? Not that often really, but yes you are twice as likely to loose everything. For use in the real world? Well stuff doesn't load much quicker, certainly not twice as fast! A clean instal of windows & bootvis will show remarkable load times, and seem very fast too, but it will slow down as time goes on.
Is RAID 0 worth it? I wouldn't go back, infact recently split it into 2 different OS drives, winxp 64 trial and linux. It 'felt' slower, so i'm back onto plain old windows at the moment, raided. May try winxp 64 trial raided now I know where the drivers are
Nox
File copies are fun with RAID I will admit - I managed near 90MB/s sustained between my primary disk and my RAID0.
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