RAID setup & performance ?

Discussion in 'General Hardware' started by generalRage1982hrv, Aug 9, 2008.

  1. generalRage1982hrv

    generalRage1982hrv ARP Reviewer

    hi guys
    well i need little help with making raid disk
    well i have two disks and i would one of them put to raid
    so would that be good and how fast would raid work
    data read cache and rest
    any benchmark info would be nice to see
     
  2. Unixlord

    Unixlord Newbie

    I'm assuming you're looking to set RAID0 which provides increased performance without any fault tolerance. The gamer's choice. :D

    You ought to be using two identical "freshly purchased" new disks. Why? Well they should be Identical so you get to use all your capacity. New disks so you aren't putting the array at risk when one drive fails prematurely.

    Lots of motherboards today support raid but if yours doesn't do hardware raid you'll have lower performance and higher cpu usage. In that case consider a good quality raid controller.

    Burst read speeds are increased along the lines of 50% and average transfer rates will be roughly doubled which is really nice.

    Games that read a lot from the HDD such as oblivion, stalker will be a lot smoother (ingame) whiler others will generally (cpu permitting) load faster. Some benchmarks show no gains for loading times simply because the rest of the system can't keep up. With a reasonably powerful rig you'll se gains accross the board.

    When doing Raid0 your hard drives are identified as a single large hard disk. All degragmentation applications (including windows' built it defrag) can properly defragment raid0 arrays. Not only do they defrag faster but the results will also be excellent so while regular defragmentation will help you get the most out of any hard drive this is specially true for raid0 arrays!

    When setting up a raid0 array you need to pick the right striping. If you do a lot of work with small files then the striping should be smaller too such as 16KB or even less. However I'm going to take a calculated guess that you'll be wanting to work with larger files such as videos, game data files etc, in that case pick a large striping setting.

    I hope I have been of some help (and hopefully accurate too). :p
     
  3. generalRage1982hrv

    generalRage1982hrv ARP Reviewer

    one more question
    dose mirror disk raid works good ?
    well you know that it is on one disk but with two partitions
     
  4. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    Can you actually do that??? :think:

    AFAIK, even if it's possible to do RAID on a single hard drive, there's no benefit at all. In fact, its performance should be worse than just using a single drive.
     
  5. Unixlord

    Unixlord Newbie

    For performance, no good.
     
  6. generalRage1982hrv

    generalRage1982hrv ARP Reviewer

    than ok i will get one more 160Gb or 250Gb disk for raid
     
  7. Unixlord

    Unixlord Newbie

    They'd better both be new disks and the same model and brand.
     
  8. generalRage1982hrv

    generalRage1982hrv ARP Reviewer

    well than that could w8 for next upgrade LOL
     
  9. Chai

    Chai Administrator Staff Member

  10. generalRage1982hrv

    generalRage1982hrv ARP Reviewer

  11. Unixlord

    Unixlord Newbie

    Can't go wrong with 16KB striping.
     
  12. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    BTW, Mirror RAID is only good for data redundancy. Unless you do stripping, its performance should be similar to that of a single drive, maybe slightly slower.
     
  13. Dashken

    Dashken Administrator!

    Good for backup I guess. :D

    I hate mirroring because I'd be wasting 1 HDD. But when things go wrong, you'll hate yourself when you never backup. :haha:
     
  14. Chai

    Chai Administrator Staff Member

    That's why I do manual backup, or just use a third party software to copy important files to the backup HDD. No need for RAID 1.
     
  15. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    Me too. :mrgreen:
     
  16. Unixlord

    Unixlord Newbie

    Certain programs can take advantage of the mirroring in RAID1 for a performance boost, but that's really rare.
     
  17. PsYkHoTiK

    PsYkHoTiK Admin nerd

    Me three. WHS ftw... :p
     

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