View Full Version : Damn, lost my data again! HD failure RAID-0
I love running 2 36.7GB Raptors in RAID-0, but I hate loosing my data when it fails... This is the third time I've had this problem. Sure the Raptors are fast & they are guaranteed for 5 years, but when one fails you have to RMA it and reinstall everthing.
I was thinking about redoing my RAID-0 setup with three Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA HD, giving me essentially 240GB of fast storage. They can be had for $45.99 now @ newegg and are supposed to be quieter and more dependable than the Raptors. I would then use a seperate 250GB HD to ghost the RAID to. What do you guys think?
Order
05-25-2006, 06:29 AM
I think RAID 0 on any non-SCSI drives is a big mistake.
Cooper
05-25-2006, 06:30 AM
3rd drive for backup is always nice. Sorry to hear about your problems with raptor raid - never had such thing myself
3rd drive for backup is always nice. Sorry to hear about your problems with raptor raid - never had such thing myself
what never had a failure or never run a RAID-0?
Cooling? You should try to keep the SMART temp value of harddrives below 40 C at all times. And yes that's pretty difficult without a dedicated fan.
While the manufacturers say 50 C is safe the 10 C less will give you a huge expansion of lifespan, and it is what Seagate specified until very recently (the 40 C).
Obviously, three WD drives in RAID-0 will not be safer than two WD drives. With proper cooling the Raptor's shouldn't be much worse anyway.
I have 2 fans moving air over them, but really don't know what temp the are running @... maybe I should look @ doing a diffferant type of RAID, maybe one with redundency like RAID-1?
Uh, you should put your drives in raid-0 unless you verify that you actually get a speedup out of it. Some usage patterns are not getting much speedup out of raid-0 at all.
You check temperatures with SMART. You should really monitor that.
epion2985
05-25-2006, 07:50 AM
I love running 2 36.7GB Raptors in RAID-0, but I hate loosing my data when it fails... This is the third time I've had this problem. Sure the Raptors are fast & they are guaranteed for 5 years, but when one fails you have to RMA it and reinstall everthing.
I was thinking about redoing my RAID-0 setup with three Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA HD, giving me essentially 240GB of fast storage. They can be had for $45.99 now @ newegg and are supposed to be quieter and more dependable than the Raptors. I would then use a seperate 250GB HD to ghost the RAID to. What do you guys think?
Do not switch to the SE. They are not meant for raids. If you must switch switch to the RE models.
Also your seek times are going to go to hell if you switch from the raptors.
Try some decent cooling, it does wonders. A small water cooling loop is nice.
I do not know how valid this is but I seem to feel by now from all the posts that the 74g raptors are more reliable and stable then the 36g once. Get a pair of the 74g. I have a 36g myself, a bit noisy since it doesnt have fluid bearings like the 74g one, so I am getting 3 74g raptors for my raid0 array next. And 5 of the WD Caviar RE WD2500YD 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb drives for the raid5 storage array.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136010
Movieman
05-25-2006, 08:06 AM
I've had excellent luck with the raptors. Just using them since last August. What I have seen a lot of is posts on problems when they are on MB SATA connection. I have 2-36's in Raid0 on a $50.00 Promise S150TX2plus SATA raid card and no issues whatsoever. Something to think on if yours are plugged into the MB..
Best of Luck!
I've had excellent luck with the raptors. Just using them since last August. What I have seen a lot of is posts on problems when they are on MB SATA connection. I have 2-36's in Raid0 on a $50.00 Promise S150TX2plus SATA raid card and no issues whatsoever. Something to think on if yours are plugged into the MB..
Best of Luck!
Ya I'm plugged into the MB... & I'm liking the sound of the fluid filled bearings on the 74GB Raptors...thanks epion2985.
proly want to ditch these 2 36.7GB HDs and go with the 74GB ones in RAID-0 with some kind of 3rd HD for backing up my system. Would Norton Ghost be a good way to back up my RAID-0?
Anyone backing up their RAID-0 arrays out there???
Do not switch to the SE. They are not meant for raids. If you must switch switch to the RE models.
Do not use the RE models with semi-software raid (aka mainboard sata raid). The RE's difference to the normal models is that they lack error recovery because real RAID systems do that without the drive's help. SATA raid does not do that. So correctable errors will suddenly turn into uncorrectable errors. Perfect opportunity to shoot all your data right in the head.
Sooo are the SE's better or the Raptors better for the semi-software type RAID-0 I'm running???
I don't think there is any inherit difference when it comes to using them in RAID.
Fast is better, but bigger is better, too.
As long as you ignore the heat sensor your data won't be save anyway.
gorcha, heat bad... speed good!!!
What's the best way to build in redundency so I don't have to keep redoing everything if I loose a drive?
Raid-1 is for redundancy but I recommend against using the mainboard onboard SATA raid for it.
Either use pure software raid or a real raid controller.
Or get a backup medium :)
Well after a little more browsing the best of both worlds seems to be RAID-0+1. This way I would have the speed of RAID-0, but the added security of a mirrored RAID-1 & If one of the 4 array drives fails it can be replaced and the RAID can rebuild itself.
Looks like I'm going to need a raid controller for this. Any reccomendations?
Delirious
05-25-2006, 12:06 PM
Well after a little more browsing the best of both worlds seems to be RAID-0+1. This way I would have the speed of RAID-0, but the added security of a mirrored RAID-1 & If one of the 4 array drives fails it can be replaced and the RAID can rebuild itself.
Looks like I'm going to need a raid controller for this. Any reccomendations?
If you want the best then i would get an areca. All of thier controllers are excellent. Highpoint is good a long with others you just have to be careful which model you get.
Yeah, Areca is the only hardware raid that I fully trust, safety and performance wise.
Personally I use pure Software raid, but AFAIK that is not available for XP.
Delirious
05-25-2006, 01:28 PM
I prefer just using raid 0 w/2 external drives for backup.
I dont see the point in haveing your backup drives in a raid array (1, 0+1, raid 5 ,etc.) unless your using hotspares and/or cant afford any downtime, like a large corp. or a time sensitive business.
specofdust
05-25-2006, 01:42 PM
Thirding the Areca suggestion. They make some of the best controllers out there, the Highpoint 2320 is a great controller, it's one of the few Highpoint ones with its on XOR engine, so your CPU won't have to do any RAID 5 calculations if you decide to use it.
I hope the OP is aware that RAID 0 makes zero difference in loading times to almost all games. It's useless for access time dependant things, it only benefits when moving files that are very big around, and games tend to have many more, smaller files. So if you're getting it in order to have better gaming performance, just don't bother using it.
Also, OCME, you might want to look into RAID 5. If done well with a decent controller(like the one suggested above) it can give file transfer speeds in excess of RAID 0, it protects just as much as RAID 1, but you only lose 1 disk to the "backup" data(parity data), instead of having everything totaly mirrored and therefore always losing 50% of your data.
Delirious
05-25-2006, 06:28 PM
BF2 maps load nearly twice as fast for me vs. a single drive. I always the first one in the game for a good 10 seconds.
But what u say is true, for most people it doesnt make as much a difference as they think it will.
I always though raid 5 was somewhere between single drive and raid 0 in speed?
WeStSiDePLaYa
05-25-2006, 06:49 PM
raid 0+1?
safan80
05-25-2006, 07:22 PM
raid5 requires at least 3 drives it has the speed of raid0 but with redundancy.
check this link out
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/single.htm
Ok RAID-5 not 0+1 is looking to be the way to go for speed, redundancy. Like specofdust mentioned it doesn't make sence to give up 50% of storage for the mirror RAID. So FTW it is looking more and mor like RAID-5 is the way to go. Just don't wan't to give up performance, and I don't wan't to chance loosing everything and having to stat from scratch again from another RAID-0 failure.
The Areca ARC-1220 controller looks to be the best for what I want to do.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816131003
Now all I have to do is figure what type of "SE drives" & how many I want to use to complete the RAID.
Any deals going on right now on storage that anyone knows about???
Delirious
05-26-2006, 04:26 AM
Drives are dirt cheap as it is, i dont think you'll find alot of really good deals cause theyre all pretty much good.
If your goin to use that Areca in your ultra-d and want the full 8x speed instead of 1x out of your top 16x slot your goin to have to mod it to sli, takes five minutes to do , but took me 2 days to figure that out.
The second slot defaults to 2x but the areca only does 1x at that low of a speed. Check out the Areca site for more info, and might as well get the latest drivers and Http control interface as well.
All in all from the driver cd to controller i was extremely impressed with everything, they thought of everything, even including a passive heatsink option.
Thanks Delirious! and everyone else for all your help...
Anyone got a link to help me do the mod on my ultra-D to sli so I can get all that 8X goodness from my mobo???
also-
where can I find the latest drivers and Http control interface @ would that be on areca's site or DFI's?
BF2 maps load nearly twice as fast for me vs. a single drive. I always the first one in the game for a good 10 seconds.
But what u say is true, for most people it doesnt make as much a difference as they think it will.
Some games profit from raid-0 because they are smart enough to arrange for huge piles of data to be loaded sequentially as it is in the filesystem. Map packs can certainly do that.
But the same isn't true for general application or compiler performance - as long as there is enough RAM.
I always though raid 5 was somewhere between single drive and raid 0 in speed?
No, it's much more complex. RAID-5 has better read performance and worse or equal write performance than single drive, depending on how fast the CPU in whatever processor is used for the xor processing.
Benchmark results are here:
http://forum.useless-microoptimizations.com/forum/raid.html
May I ask what type drive or file system you are using uOpt?
May I ask what type drive or file system you are using uOpt?
Those were three 400 GB 7200.9 SATA. All benchmarks ext3fs on Linux and ufs2 on FreeBSD.
Delirious
05-29-2006, 05:36 PM
Those were three 400 GB 7200.9 SATA. All benchmarks ext3fs on Linux and ufs2 on FreeBSD.
Do u feel you get better drive performance from linux than from windows? I guessing yes.
Its very easy to mod the ultra-d.
Head over to dfi-street.com and do a search, there are a few good guides there, thats where i went to read one.
kyleslater
05-29-2006, 06:08 PM
I like Raid 0 But I have two spare drives for my data so if the Raid fails all I loose is the OS. Now that SE vs. RE drives... I never knew the SE were not good for raid... Good to know...
Do u feel you get better drive performance from linux than from windows? I guessing yes.
I never did anything important or performance-critical on Windows so I wouldn't know. Since software raid seems to be part of only Windows 2003 Server or some expensive edition like that I don't think this is easily comparable either.
Not sure about the Ultra-D reference :confused:
Delirious
05-30-2006, 05:27 AM
2003 server editions support raid 5 software raid, but i think everyone knows that software raid doesnt compare to hardware raid. :D
The ultra-d reference was for OCme.
I never did anything important or performance-critical on Windows so I wouldn't know. Since software raid seems to be part of only Windows 2003 Server or some expensive edition like that I don't think this is easily comparable either.
Not sure about the Ultra-D reference :confused:
2003 server editions support raid 5 software raid, but i think everyone knows that software raid doesnt compare to hardware raid. :D
My results for software RAID-5 actually compare very well with hardware raid controllers.
Of course I did the benchmarks with a 2.90 GHz Opteron :D
Delirious
05-30-2006, 09:14 AM
My results for software RAID-5 actually compare very well with hardware raid controllers.
Of course I did the benchmarks with a 2.90 GHz Opteron :D
if a hardware based raid controller existed with an opteron onboard it would probably wipe the floor with the software raid :D
Thats kinda interesting though, ive never compared the two, essentially raid is raid its just a matter of what is doing the work, bogging down the cpu and memory to run raid isnt always the greatest idea for some machines.
I am ordering the Areca ARC-1210 card & 4 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB HD's to complete my RAID-5. What is the best block/cluster size to use...4k,8k,16k,32,64k?
Thats kinda interesting though, ive never compared the two, essentially raid is raid its just a matter of what is doing the work, bogging down the cpu and memory to run raid isnt always the greatest idea for some machines.
I think you misestimate how much faster CPUs are by now in comparision to the much more stagnating harddrives.
If you look at the CPU usage numbers in my benchmarks you can see that even the XOR on raid-5 RAID is done by the Opteron more or less on the side with plenty CPU to spare. In fact the filesystem overhead is now more than the RAID overhead. Writing 60 MB/sec takes 22% CPU for RAID-5 and filesystem combined.
RAID-0 and RAID-1 basically comes for free CPU-wise, the little computation required for them is totally in the noise.
I didn't directly compare yet but it also seems that thanks to my RAID having much more CPU power available than hardware controllers I also have a much shortened RAID-5 recovery time.
Delirious
05-30-2006, 02:26 PM
interesting, so hardware controllers becoming obsolete?
I think you misestimate how much faster CPUs are by now in comparision to the much more stagnating harddrives.
If you look at the CPU usage numbers in my benchmarks you can see that even the XOR on raid-5 RAID is done by the Opteron more or less on the side with plenty CPU to spare. In fact the filesystem overhead is now more than the RAID overhead. Writing 60 MB/sec takes 22% CPU for RAID-5 and filesystem combined.
RAID-0 and RAID-1 basically comes for free CPU-wise, the little computation required for them is totally in the noise.
I didn't directly compare yet but it also seems that thanks to my RAID having much more CPU power available than hardware controllers I also have a much shortened RAID-5 recovery time.
[TAG]Imp
05-30-2006, 08:15 PM
Easiest solution, honestly? Get norton ghost, and backup your HD everyone once in a while on a floppy or a CD. When a drive dies, buy another, stick it in, and use ghost to restore ur HDD.
Delirious
05-31-2006, 05:53 AM
Imp']Easiest solution, honestly? Get norton ghost, and backup your HD everyone once in a while on a floppy or a CD. When a drive dies, buy another, stick it in, and use ghost to restore ur HDD.
Back up 600GB to a floppy?
Norton ghost is the worst back up program, i threw it away a couple of days after i got it, acronis is much easier and it works, but we already covered that a couple of posts back.
Imp']Easiest solution, honestly? Get norton ghost, and backup your HD everyone once in a while on a floppy or a CD. When a drive dies, buy another, stick it in, and use ghost to restore ur HDD.
backing up a large amount of data to floppies or CDs would not work well in my opinion. DVDs are doable but I had trouble using Norton Ghost with my 2 small 36GB Raptors in RAID-0 backing it up to DVDs... With the cost of storage being under 50 cents a Gig it is I feel RAID-5 is the way to go.
interesting, so hardware controllers becoming obsolete?
No, they have other advantages. Their pure speed advantage however will go away if it hasn't already.
You see the CPU power than you can put into even a residential machine with a dual 2.6 MHz AMD64 is incredibly much more than you can put onto the PCIe/PCI-X controller card.
There are still tradeoffs, such as if you actually need 100% of your CPUs you still want it offloaded to the controller, even if it would get slower.
%%
But on the other hand, never underestimate how important the quicker recovery time of a RAID-5 with massive CPU power is.
You see after the RAID-5 array degraded to N-1 disks for whatever reason you are running basically the risk equivalent to RAID-0. One more disk going down before you re-synced a disk and upgraded back to full RAID-5 and you are dead dead dead.
So if your recovery takes 3 hours you have 3 hours of vulnerability, and that starts from the moment that your spare disk becomes accessible, which might only be after your operator inserted a disk if you didn't have a hot spare. Reducing that to 1 hour using massive CPU power can be a huge - life-saving - advantage.
Of course the hardware raid and software raid have other advantages each which will probably override the, by now minor, speed advantage.
NOTE: the onboard SATA raid "RAID" stuff does not count as software RAID here, none of the above applies to it.
backing up a large amount of data to floppies or CDs would not work well in my opinion. DVDs are doable but I had trouble using Norton Ghost with my 2 small 36GB Raptors in RAID-0 backing it up to DVDs... With the cost of storage being under 50 cents a Gig it is I feel RAID-5 is the way to go.
The problem is that for a real backup you want to be safe against files slowly corrupting.
Let's say you open file ~/foo.txt and you discover that the contents have been garbled for whatever software or hardware reasons.
With a real backup you can see whether it was already garbled last week, last month or 6 months ago.
The harddrive based backup usually doesn't work that way.
%%
A mixed approach can work, however. If you have a slow change rate, you can do your initial backup onto some expensive medium, and then do incremental backups onto DVDs.
crackhead2k
05-31-2006, 08:35 AM
try raid 0+1 so you get perfroamcne adn reliability
Delirious
05-31-2006, 01:31 PM
The problem is that for a real backup you want to be safe against files slowly corrupting.
Let's say you open file ~/foo.txt and you discover that the contents have been garbled for whatever software or hardware reasons.
With a real backup you can see whether it was already garbled last week, last month or 6 months ago.
The harddrive based backup usually doesn't work that way.
%%
A mixed approach can work, however. If you have a slow change rate, you can do your initial backup onto some expensive medium, and then do incremental backups onto DVDs.
Thats why i dont think raid 5 is worth anything to home users unless they invest in a spare drive just in case one fails or use a hot spare.
If a home user runs raid 5 and a drives fails and he doesnt have an indentical back up drive to swap out then he has to order one from where ever. IF he runs raid 0 and backs up to an external drive and his array fails he does the same thing, order a new one from where ever install the drive and wipe the array and restore from backup, but with raid 5 you rebuild not restore from backup. So imho there isnt much benefit for the home user either way.
Now for a corp. where time is money they'll more than likely be running with hotspares so as soon as one drive goes down it can start rebuilding immediately.
There are too many way to kill this bird(backup/redundancy) each has its own benefits and downsides.
try raid 0+1 so you get perfroamcne adn reliability
If you have 4 drives and use 2 for raid 0 and 2 for raid1 thats goin to be slower than 4 in raid 0.
I think what u mean is that its a trade off between raid 0 and raid 1, definetly not the speed of raid 0.
From what i understand its less calculation intensive running with raid 0+1 than raid 5 cause both are essentially the same.
I plan on running a RAID-5 using Areca' 1210 controller w/ 4 HD's, 3 in the array & 1 hotspare... seems to be the best little poor man RAID I can configure for now. Performance & protection agnist data loss for under $1000.00
Do not use the RE models with semi-software raid (aka mainboard sata raid). The RE's difference to the normal models is that they lack error recovery because real RAID systems do that without the drive's help. SATA raid does not do that. So correctable errors will suddenly turn into uncorrectable errors. Perfect opportunity to shoot all your data right in the head.
Before I order the HD's this Friday I need something clairified. For the Areca ARC-1210 controller I will be using do I want to order the RE or the SE HD's. It looks like the RE are better for RAID's because they have RAID-specific time-limited error recovery that improves compatibility with RAID adapters, and prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop hard drives. uOpt said the RE HD's do not have error recovery but it looks like they are the ones that do...
crackhead2k
06-01-2006, 12:50 PM
controller has onboard ram right?
If so you should get good performance out of it are you running a server?
controller has onboard ram right?
If so you should get good performance out of it are you running a server?
yes the controller has onboard 128MB on-board DDR333 SDRAM with ECC protection and from the reviews I'm sure I'll get good performance, but should I use RE or SE HD's in the RAID?
Nocturnal
06-01-2006, 04:17 PM
Are your hard drives hot to touch when you put your hands on them?
Before I order the HD's this Friday I need something clairified. For the Areca ARC-1210 controller I will be using do I want to order the RE or the SE HD's. It looks like the RE are better for RAID's because they have RAID-specific time-limited error recovery that improves compatibility with RAID adapters, and prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop hard drives. uOpt said the RE HD's do not have error recovery but it looks like they are the ones that do...
The RAID Edition whatever it is called is what you need. I was incorrect in saying it has no error recovery, actually it is a strickly time-limited error recovery.
You can also switch that feature on and off, so it is not entirely clear to me whether there's a hard difference here at all.
Personally I think all this is suspect. Why do all the other vendors than WD not feel the need for raid editions? All all those other vendors are the professional harddrive vendors which also do SCSI.
I suspect that WD is just covering up firmware bugs here. I would buy Seagate or Fujitsu. I have no problems with Seagte P-ATA or SATA drives dropping from my arrays.
There are some guys over at the 2cpu forum who know more about that WD raid business.
as always a wealth of info... thanks uOpt!
I think I'll stear clear of WD for the RAID and look at getting Seagate SATA HD's
Nanometer
06-02-2006, 02:25 PM
I agree with a RAID-5 array with 3, or even 4 hard drives. I haven't personally used this typ at home, because I don't value any of my C:\ data. Only thing I install in it are drivers and games, everything else goes to e:\ and backup HDD.
Delirious
06-04-2006, 10:28 AM
I agree with a RAID-5 array with 3, or even 4 hard drives. I haven't personally used this typ at home, because I don't value any of my C:\ data. Only thing I install in it are drivers and games, everything else goes to e:\ and backup HDD.
Just like it should it be :D
I wouldnt call raid the poor mans backup :P That would more likely be just buying spare hard drive(s) and hook them up, backup, disconnect, and store somewhere safe, doesnt get much cheaper than that.
Just like it should it be :D
I wouldnt call raid the poor mans backup :P That would more likely be just buying spare hard drive(s) and hook them up, backup, disconnect, and store somewhere safe, doesnt get much cheaper than that.
Delirious, your billient!!! Why didn't I think of that! You just gave me some food for thought...
I think a better and cheeper way of keeping my important data safe & still keeping the performance of my RAID-0 for my C: drive would be to just have a drive installed in a ICY Dock SATA hot swapable drive rack so my data can be Firstly safe, and secondly poratble.
check this out!
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=212&products_id=4188
Delirious
06-04-2006, 06:08 PM
You dont even need one of those, but if u move your backuped data around alot it would be a good idea.
[TAG]Imp
06-04-2006, 06:58 PM
Norton Ghost ftw...
epion2985
06-05-2006, 02:38 AM
There is nothing wrong with the WD. The RE drives are excellent.
You can go the way I went. Have a RAID0 array with a few raptors for os and applications and a RAID5 array with 7200rpm WD RE drives for storage.
You want the RAID0 array on your Southbridge controller, and your RAID 5 array on a PCIe controller (preferably).
Southbridge controllers, being built in to the southbridge, have no bus limitations (bandwidth, latency, etc). They are very good at RAID 0, 1, and 10, but generally offer poor RAID 5 performance due to a lack of a dedicated XOR processor.
Imp']Norton Ghost ftw...
Norton Ghost did not work very well for me... I used it to back everything up to 7 DVD's & when I had a drive fail I followed thir recovery instructions, but it didn't work. It might of had something to do with the the Raptor HD's or the RAID-0 I was trying to put the the recovery on. :(
[TAG]Imp
06-05-2006, 03:20 PM
Norton Ghost did not work very well for me... I used it to back everything up to 7 DVD's & when I had a drive fail I followed thir recovery instructions, but it didn't work. It might of had something to do with the the Raptor HD's or the RAID-0 I was trying to put the the recovery on. :(
are you sure? Because i'm certain that you can do it. It doesn't recognize certain raid controllers though... that could be the problem.
Imp']are you sure? Because i'm certain that you can do it. It doesn't recognize certain raid controllers though... that could be the problem.
Maybe so, but this time I'm going with the new ICY Dock SATA hot swapable drive rack & a big drive for storage. I think it's really cool cuz you can back up all your data then remove it, while downloading, for safe storage while your computer is running. You can take all your important data with you when traveling... :)