About to do my first raid 0 setup. Have some questions...

[T07N]

I've never done a raid setup. I'm planning to do a raid 0 soon on 2 seagate 250gb 7000.8rpm 8mb cache drives. Where will I notice the difference? I was told windows won't load any faster from what I read on this forum in some other thread. I just want windows to load faster and I want to do more

I just want windows to load faster and hdd to slow me down less. Everything on my new rig is being held back by my hdd setup.

Got some questions:

1. What's burst speed and what does it determine?

2. What are the pros and cons of 1x raptor 74gb vs 2x seagate 250gb raid 0?

3. If I do run raid 0 what are the stripe size should I run at? What happens if stripe size is high or low?

4. What are the advantages to having more cache? Does the hdd work faster?

[trans am]

larger stripe size=better for large transfers. (DVD iso) etc.

I always go with 32kb stripe. single raptor is still faster than those seagates in raid 0

yes! more cache = hard drive work faster.

[T07N]

Went ahead and bought myself a raptor already. Damn windows load much much faster now. If I raid another raptor I'm sure I'll still feel the difference. Thanks so much.

[epion2985]

you will :)

but before you jump in to raid0 thinking its the greatest thing since sliced bread might want to do some reading.

http://cracauer-forum.cons.org/forum/raid-hints.html

[Drag]

about raid 0 and raid 5:


RAID0 and RAID5 shouldnt really be compared as they are 2 completely different things. Each have their positives and negatives.

The main reason people tend to shy from RAID0 is its inherent risks to data security. If a single drive dies in a RAID0 array you lose all of the data on all of the drives in that array.

RAID5 sorts this by adding parity information. You lose one drive's worth of capacity to the array but you gain redundancy: if one drive dies in a RAID5 array you haven't lost any data and continue to use the array as if nothing has happened (though you should replace the drive to retain redundancy)

RAID0 has the advantage of very low controller overheads. This means that it can be done with a controller with relatively little power (ie, onboard a motherboard) and doesnt suck up cpu cycles. RAID5 controllers need to calculate parity information when writing data to the array which really chew up cpu cycles on an onboard controller (and severly limit write speeds). To do RAID5 properly you really do need a powerful controller, unfortunately these are quite expensive.

RAID0 is often used in desktop systems thinking that it will make everything much faster, when in actual fact it can do more harm than good. As a games drive, it can indeed speed up loading times, as these are mainly reliant on sustained read speeds from disk (something that RAID0 and RAID5 do very well). As a system drive, RAID0 can actually slow a system down. An OS like windows consists of lots of quite small files, many of these smaller than the RAID stripe size in the array (this is the smallest size into which files will be broken when split accross the drives). Files that are smaller than this size will simply be written to a single drive and read from a single drive. Coupled with the slight increase in average access time with RAID0, this can slow down things like loading an OS.

The same goes for RAID5 (regarding small files), but people dont tend to use this at home for performance - redundancy is generally the primary aim.

The place where RAID is at home is in servers, it was never really intended for desktop use. RAID0 is slightly uncommon in server environments due to the risk of data loss (performance critical environments also tend to require high reliability). RAID10 or RAID0+1 are common combinations of RAID0 and RAID1, which offers the same performance as RAID0 and also the redundancy of RAID1 (though double the amount of disks are needed)

RAID5 (and variants of it, IE RAID-50 which can be simplified to a RAID0 of many RAID5s) is very common in servers due to its excellent all round performance. The only area where is lags a bit behind RAID0 is write performace due to both the calculations performed by the controller and the necessity to write the parity information as well as the actual data with every write.

[Soulburner]

Interesting, so RAID0 can actually have a negative effect on some things and positive effects on others?

[Drag]

yeah but trust me raid0 is always faster then raid5, unless you have like the perfect raid controller

[berk]

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1297/index03.asp

Actual games/xp loading times in there and thereabouts: 2 raptors raid 0 (excellent performance)..
Raptors raid0 x 4 is absolutely blinding and ill try to find the linky somewhere.

EDIT:http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raptor150raid&page=5&cookie%5Ftest=1