I've seen a number of hardware-oriented developers talk about setting up striped RAID arrays on their personal desktops. It does seem like a reasonable idea, given the current strong trend towards "doubling up" on hardware to leverage performance benefits from parallelism in various forms-- dual core CPUs, dual channel DDR, dual graphics cards in SLI, and dual hard drives in RAID 0.
RAID 0+1 is exactly that, from my understanding. 2 striped disks, mirrored onto 2 other striped disks.
ALL HOME USER PC’s should be RAID1 or better. HOME USERS HAVE NO BACKUP STRATEGIES to speak of! When their cheap @ss HDD fails, too many friends have said "What can I do to recover my photos of my trip to “X” where “X” is somewhere they will never visit again. I suggest a drive recovery company ($600-$2000) And they balk. Sucks to not have redundant data. How important IS your data?
If you’re going the multiple drive route, why not partition the data according to how it’s going to be accessed. I usually put my (barely used)swapfile and database files on my second drive, with the OS and projects on the first drive. That way I can have I/O going on both sets of devices more or less simultaniously.
External drives have gotten cheap. I picked up a Maxtor 300 GB drive for ~ $220. You can back up to it reasonably fast, and it won’t die if your MB fries your internal drives.
How are you going to restore? I have two installs of XP on seperate drives. If one goes, I can replace the drive, boot the other copy of XP and restore the first one. Theoretically.
When I built my last system, I did go for RAID 0 across two SATA drives. I really like having one large disk, and the speed is good. I haven’t compared it to a single drive (other than my older slower system), but it seems fast to me.
I’m aware of the reliabilty issue, and was making backups regularly for a while, but have started slacking off.
Maybe I should use them as seperate drives on my next OS reinstall.
I had a motherboard with a RAID 0 set die on me. Sucked because I couldn’t read my data off without buying another MB with the EXACT same controller, and that was not easy to find a year and half later in the computer market. Luckily I found one, and my new computer is SATA RAID 0 w/ WD Raptor. I really like it, but to offset the worry of failure I bought an under $200 120 gig Maxtor external and backup to it every night so I could at least read the data on the other machine. Combine that with VCS on a server and I’m pretty comfortable that most of my important data is safe.
Nowadays I think RAID1 is the bare minimum any computer should have. With hard drives currently it’s not IF it’s going to fail, it’s WHEN is it going to fail (usually 1 month after the warranty run out
RAID5 is probably the best bang for your buck, but not many home controllers support it (imho). I can’t see why anyone would use RAID 0+1 instead of RAID5.
If somebody is looking for a good backup software, you should check out Acronis True Image. Truely great software, which makes it possible that I can backup the last 3 weeks (backup every day) of my 200GB data onto a 250GB drive.
If you’d like a boost in speed, but are concerned about integrity, just step up to a drive that spins at 10k rpm
This is definitely true and good advice. After looking at these benchmarks, I recently upgraded to a 74gb 10k RPM Raptor drive as my system/OS drive, and relegated my existing 250gb SATA to data duties.
The performance benefit of the 10k raptors is definitely measurable in boot and load times. And it’s noticeable. Surprisingly, it’s not that loud either. There’s virtually no idle whine at all, and seeks aren’t that loud. I was quite impressed!
Nowadays I think RAID1 is the bare minimum any computer should have.
Right, but as Ryan pointed out, you better have the exact same mobo/chipset to restore that data. I think software RAID1 is a better solution, ultimately, because it’s more flexible and can be deployed/restored on any mobo. It’s too bad that you can’t do RAID1 in a convenient way using XP Pro. I believe it disallows mirroring on the boot volume which makes it almost useless…
Who out there finds a good SATA drive too slow? I switched to SATA from U160 SCSI and never looked back. No need for RAID on desktop… SATA is the fastest and most economical solution for the desktop out there. (A lot quieter than fast SCSIs too.)
Right, but as Ryan pointed out, you better have the exact same mobo/chipset to restore that data. I think software RAID1 is a better solution, ultimately, because it’s more flexible and can be deployed/restored on any mobo. It’s too bad that you can’t do RAID1 in a convenient way using XP Pro. I believe it disallows mirroring on the boot volume which makes it almost useless…
I’ve found that disks that are RAID1 on the MOBO quite happily work as standalone, and as the extension of that, they work on a new MOBO. Then, if I need another MOBO, I just mirror based on the functional disk that I have (assuming one of the two fried with the MOBO), and I’m back in business. Done it. It works.
I’ve found that disks that are RAID1 on the MOBO quite happily work as standalone,
Oh yeah, you’re right, I wasn’t thinking that through. It’s RAID 0, striping, that is dependent on the implementation. RAID 1, mirroring, should be a simple, perfect 1:1 copy of the data on each drive.
I switched to SATA from U160 SCSI and never looked back
I can definitely recommend the 74gb 10,000rpm SATA Raptor drive as a system/boot drive. The difference in speed over the 7,200rpm drives is very noticeable in actual use. Bootup and load times are significantly reduced. And it’s not particularly noisy, either!
I have installed two Maxtor Sata 80MB drives hooked up as raid 0. I also have another hard drive hooked up as a standard IDE drive used for backup. My Sata drives have crashed three times. The first time was using the Scan Disk programs from Microsoft, The next time it was using the Defrag program from microsoft. The last time was loading the Norton System Works Go Back program. All of these required reformatting the hard drive. The hard drives are perfect–just programs fouling up the boot record and registery. Windows will not boot. Windows cannot repair. Windows does not recognize the drive.
I also have used 4 different Video editing and Authoring programs. Some have trouble with my drive. Some do not read in the full clips. Others take 1 hour per minute of video to render however it is successful.
I can’t see why anyone would use RAID 0+1 instead of RAID5.
There’s pros and cons to both setups. For personal use, I would choose 0+1 over Raid5 because the write times are much faster. Raid5 has a major hit in write performance due to the parity involved. In many office situations, data is more often read than written ( typically smaller files like Docs), so raid5 is fine. The catch with 0+1 is you only get half the drive space available versus raid5’s “Total Drives - 1” amount (4x200GB=800GB, but only 600GB is available ).
I’m reading this thread 'cause my warranty on two Raptors in RAID0 is over now, and though it’s been the fastest desktop performance I’ve ever tried (under FreeBSD and 1GB of RAM) on a desktop, I’m a bit worried - no more warranty, but the noise of “clicks and clacks” is getting worse every day now
Do the disks really die soon after it starts happening?
If your disks are making unusual noises, BACK UP YOUR DATA IMMEDIATELY. That’s never, ever good!
And this goes double if you’re on RAID 0 (striping). That means your chance of failure doubles and there’s no easy way to recover data from a striped drive!
Let me start off by saying ANY form of RAID is not meant for the typical home user. Do you seriously think Uncle Joe or Grandma Lou-Anne will even know what it is? You should have some clue of what you are doing when you decide you want to build a RAID array. Those who know what they are doing, know the concequences.
With modern processors (the Dual-cores, AMD X2/FX-series, Hyperthreaders, etc.) the bottleneck is not so much the system bus or the memory speed anymore - it is, you guessed it, the hard drive. RAID 0 has a significant improvement depending on how new or advanced your system is. The new SATA-II drives (3.0GB/s) in a RAID array will run laps around just about any drive out there today.
I noticed other people saying just to buy a 10,000RPM drive. Wrong! Not only will the difference in speed be minimal compared to a RAID 0 array, but the real delay in hard drives is the time it takes the drive to adjust to the platters. Not to mention, the faster drives create more heat, thereby not decresing your chances of failure that much either (perhaps even increasing them).
Now, I’m not denying the chances of failure are great. I’m not suggesting that at all. But going back to my first point: those who setup RAID should know what they are doing. ANY GOOD COMPUTER USER KNOWS TO BACKUP THEIR FILES! That doesn’t always mean on another drive or partition (I use an external USB hard drive), but also DVDs or CDs as well. I use Tweak UI to specify to automatically put all of my personal stuff in the “My Documents” folder onto the external drive. WD also makes an external USB drive with automatic backup feature. It’s like building a street car… how much are you willing to spend to go fast.
I noticed other people saying just to buy a 10,000RPM drive. Wrong! Not only will the difference in speed be minimal compared to a RAID 0 array, but the real delay in hard drives is the time it takes the drive to adjust to the platters. Not to mention, the faster drives create more heat, thereby not decresing your chances of failure that much either (perhaps even increasing them).
You’re making a lot of claims without providing any evidence to back them up.
None of the benchmark or reliability data I’ve seen supports what you are saying. In fact, you’re dangerously close to misinformation.
If you like desktop RAID, fine, but the data tells me that A) there’s no meaningful performance improvement for the vast majority of apps, and B) it doubles your chance of drive failure.
Now, on a server, it’s a different story.
The future of desktop hard drives is probably hybridized flash memory/magnetic platter drives.
I’ve got a pair of 120Gb SATA disks hooked up to my desktop PC as RAID0, and I have to say that the performance improvement over 2 separate volumes is noticeable.
I was doing some scalability testing on a large database not long ago, and the RAID0 configuration was about twice as fast as the separate disk configuration, on roughly similar hardware.
Of course, with DB programming, there’s always the possibility of manually splitting the database across multiple spindles (data files vs. log files vs. tempdb), but I’ve noticed the speed in other scenarios as well.
On the other hand, I do have a reasonable backup regime in place: All of my data files are stored on a networked server with RAID5, which is periodically (although not as often as I should) backed up to external (USB 2.0) disks.
I’ve read the benchmark articles but none seem to mention compilation performance. Has anyone done any benchmarks comparing compilation times for (say) a 10k RPM raptor versus a pair of them in RAID 0?
I’m looking to upgrade the desktop PCs for the developers at work and some guys have been pushing hard that RAID-0 is a big performance win for compiling. Is it?
I’m looking to upgrade the desktop PCs for the developers at work and some guys have been pushing hard that RAID-0 is a big performance win for compiling. Is it?
Highly unlikely. Just get them 10,000 rpm Western Digital raptors for best performance, and forget about RAID.
