Desktop RAID: Oversold?

The question I am left with reading this thread is why is backup so avoided by everyone, including “professionals”? It is almost as if anything at all is better than backing up - even spending the same money on RAID1 as a ‘pretend’ backup.

It has taken me so long to perfect my PC, and the work I do on it represents such a large chunk of my life, and in some cases I have clients depending on it, I don’t think I could live without 2 copies of backup (one stored offsite) and a proven (e.g. tested) recovery plan.

Every time an IT professional suggests to me that I would be better off using RAID1 instead, I ask them what good will it do me if I accidentally delete a file, have my house burn down or my PC stolen in a burgulary? The usual response is a blank look, a long pause, and the answer “that never occurred to me”.

Remember, the RAID advice I’ve provided is for desktops. For the server situation described by Roger Lipscombe:

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

… the answer may very well be different.

So, if I want to build a gaming PC with 2 7,200 RPM HDDs in a RAID-1 setup (which should almost double read speed), is there any point to getting a 10,000 RPM Raptor for the OS drive?

I back up my data to 2 ide’s. One I leave plugged in and the other I store in a box as a secondary. My Satas are in raid 0.

With RAID 5 and 1 you are only protected against hd failures. You still need a back up the data to another HD or tape drive. That cost money. RAID or no RAID.

If a primary hd goes bad you have to replace and reinstall either way. In fact, if you didnt have the money you could just take the raid 0 out and you have another hard drive already.

If your dumb enough not to have a backup then obviously raid is not for you. This article assumes 99 percent of people are that dumb.

And to the above poster… Raid 1 does not double your read speed. It is comparable to a single drive.

I’ve been using RAID 0 for my two home desktops and it’s been a great time saver. I use Photoshop heavily and process thousands of files, so the speed of opening and saving files is worth every second of savings.

Jeff. Perhaps its time to replace this outdated blog with one more in tune with todays reality. First your correct when you say Grandma @ Grandpa who play cards online or access email on occasion dont need a Raid array. From there we’ll let everyone else makeup their own minds with a small utility and a couple of screenshots i took using my system. I do browse the web,access my email,chat on our forum and use JASC Paintshop Pro7,and my wife uses MS Office. However 90% of time i use my machine for what i built it for, hardcore online FPS gaming; DOOM3, Quake4, Call of Duty2, etc. For going on 4 years now i’ve run different sizes and arrays of RAID including 0,1,0+1,5 on different PC’s. Unlike poor Elton Wilmot I’ve never had a HD failure,(i use only Seagate ATA or SATA HDD.)or any of the other problems he stated, perhaps because its installed correctly (by me) or the fact the entire operating system is stable even though its overclocked as all the systems i put together are.(Overclocking is truly something most people shouldnt do!)I believe Elton had a whole lot more wrong then a RAID setup! There is WITHOUT QUESTION a noticable performance increase when utilizing a hardware configured Raid array over a single HDD. On July 7, 2005 you stated your thoughts along with afew exceptionally guestionable examples of under researched articles and the statement by AnandTech,(a pinnacle of knowledge)to draw a conclusion thats far from correct. Over a year before your statement a small utility was out that anyone could use to test HD performance and compare ATA or SATA or SCSI in Raid and observe how other operating systems utilize HDD’s IO’s, heres a link. www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach. Here is 2 different screenshots 1 with and 1 without a comparison to a single drive of the exact same type and number of my HD’s. Notice the sequential read speeds,the average read speeds and the most telling difference the burst speed. http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=4354255 ,and http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=4354256. Also both of my drives are Generation 1 SATA @ 1.5GB/sec the new Gen.2 at 3GB/s blow these away at over 100GB/s sequential read speeds. There are far more articles and benchmarks available online for further documentation of the speed and performance of using a Raid setup then can be listed here…AMD FX-60 @2.92, ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe NForce4, 2x1024 Corsair 3200 XMS Pro, 2x80Gb Seagate SATA in Raid0, 2xNvidia 7950GX2’s Quad-SLI, 21" Sony Trinitron, WC 101 Watercooling custom mount 5700rpm Thermaltake fan, Cavalier3 Coolermaster case, BFG Tech 1000 Watt PSU, LiteON CDRW SOHR-5239V, LiteON DVDRW SHW-160P6S, USB LiteON DVDRW.

Well Well.
I have had 2 WD 150 HDs setup via raid 0 for a whopping 300 gig. with My OS on it.

Flawless…until I ran my own vent server and GuildWars at the same time…Numerous bluescreen reboots. and the last one I just had, states Unable to detect one of my raid 0 drives.

I have a msi 875p FIS2R neo

now I am concerned that ll my music, photos, everything has been lost.
and I do have an external 500 esata that I forgot to back my music up to…anyhope to recover data through bios o anything? The drive works, no sound, it just shows up as being “not detected”

mangostain@yahoo.com

The cheapest setup to offer some data security is to partition a single drive one partition for windows and other disposable apps that can be reinstalled. The second partition would contain all your downloads photos etc so if things do go belly up it will most likely only damage the windows partition.
Better again is two seperate drives and it is not hard to write a simple batch file to backup all your my documents folder to the seperate partition or drive using robocopy that with the right parameters can quickly backup only new and changed files.

I’m seriously thinking about either running raid 0 or getting the WD Raptor drives… but all this information and conflicting opinions just confuse me…

I’m in process of building an extreme set up,

EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR 680i Sli Chipset Motherboard
Intel Quad Core QX6700 CPU or X6800???
Corsair Dominator 2X2048-6400C3DF DDR2-800 RAM
EVGA nVidia 8800GTX KO w/ACS3 GPU

As far as i can tell that’s pretty much the most extreme set up; non-overclocked, i can get on paper. Now with such a system i’m seriously worried about bottlenecks, wouldn’t it suck once i spent all that hard earned cash and found my HDD’s let me down something terrible!!!

I’m going with SATA-300 at least, but with all this contradicting views and info, i’m well confused, there doesn’t seem to be any real tests performed on obvious things, file transfers, boot ups, game loading speeds, program loading speeds…etc, all just program running performances, but surely thats when your RAM’s more important than your HDD??? I want things to load quick, save quick, write quick, read quick, and transfer quick!

Also I’ve seen the WD-RE enterprise drives which are gurranteed to an average of 1-Million hours, surely a couple of these drives in RAID 0, and a strict back up routine would prove more benificial than a WD Raptor drive or even just plain old SATA drive.

I can get 2 x 250GB WD RE drives for 50 cheaper than one WD 150GB Raptor, and i’ve read horror stories about Raptor failing big in the long term.

Also i’ve never had a drive failure ever, after extensive 5 years of usage… constantly reading/writing large 2-8GB files! When people’s RAID 0 drives crash is it because of their maintenance routines? Poor choice of Drives or other equipment? Operating conditions?.. or is it just because they run RAID 0???

Any suggestions???

Oh yeah i forgot to mention, i was cotimplating running more than just two drives in RAID 0, 3 or 4 160GB drives, would this make a huge difference to all those benchmarks???

Will it kill system performance?

I love these threads… So many folks out there stateing the facts based on some goof ball benchmarks… Benchmarks are not 100% and only cover the particular circumstances set by the tester. Benchmarks are notoriously accurate but at the same time not real life benchmarks. You get a specific breakdown of a specific point in time based on a specific configuration… Please… if you want to spout off about how RAID 0 sucks… then try running it for over 5 years. I have had one failure due to a bad drive… and yes… I know if it crashes I loose it all… but I still run it… Why? Number one… I like living on the edge and I like speed. So qoute your retarded benchmarks on a handful of situations and flame me now… because like everything else in life experience says it all. Benchmarks are for people that one quick results and instant ammo for threads to make the world think they are the next prodigy. Take cars for instance… Ok we test the new prototype in a controlled environment and get great results… great handling…speed etc. Ok… now road test… uh ohhh… not so great specs… The so called controlled environment is no longer controlled.

Granted… IDE RAID o and early RAID controllers at times I think (based on my experience with all kinds of controllers and setups)were poor performers and yes I think gave bad results regardless of goofy benchmarks wether sporting good performance or poor.

However next gen controllers… better drives… better boards etc have since really streamlined and elimenated bottlenecks. 90 percent of the computer users don’t even know what a bottle neck is other than a bud light etc. I have always seen the Hard drive as the major bottle neck for yearssssss! Thats why I started messing with RAID.

The bottom line… I’m not a tech sitting at a bench running some benchmark software… I have, but I prefer real world scenario’s. To drive a simulator is not the same as being on the road so to speak.
I live and breath computers and my Biz is 10 years old. I mainly work for companies… I have 25+ years in gaming and yes… my machine is tweaked to the max and I upgrade 3 or 4 times a year… All I want is performance. Crash if you will… I can reload. fragmented… junked up with files you name it… my pc still loads the same. Fast… We have LAN parties etc… and me being the only RAID 0 guy… well I am the first on the arena almost everytime and being the first to load and get on the map is crucial at times.

So flame me now… I have no benchmark proof… all I have is 10+ years of experience and knowledge of hardware on a grand scale. Not to mention many other things. RAID 0 works… benchmarks or not… Its not 100% but what is? Sometimes things work better than other times… some configurations are worse… some better. Based on at least 5 years running RAID 0 yes… it works… and yes there is a noticeable difference… sometimes more often in some circumstances than others… and sometimes not. if your an enthusiast… do it. If your a regular joe… stay away.

What everyone needs to be fired up about is overclocking. You want instabilty? Do some overclocking… see how many times you crash before you fly… and then let the temps or humidity change a little and crash again… Pushing your system to the max for such little gain and such huge amounts of wear on your components is not to bright… Overclocking is purely bragging rights… go ahead and spout off some killer overclocks… none will impress me because your prematurely killing your machine.

Sorry for the lecture… but I’m sick of the clowns sitting at their pc quoteing sites and benchmarks… Most probably never even ran RAID 0 or if they did… they were biast from the get go and stopped when the pc didn’t lift off and fly away.

Forget benchmarks… be the benchmark.

I am also looking at setting up a raid 0 config. The other plus for raid is when you want mega storage capacity in a single volume. It seems that the price for storage (at this point) starts gaining at around the 300gig+ mark. So if you need a huge volume (500 gigs+), the price difference between one massive drive and 2 cheaper ones is about equal, with the raid giving better (if marginal) performance.

So many comparisons also list only 2 drives in a raid 0 config. I am looking at putting 4 250 gig drives into a raid 0. I would think that the performance boost is highly dependant on the quantity of drives splitting the work.

I am probably semi unique in that I play with huge applications, then trash them a month later (current project involves VMware with 8 virtual machines, 3 virtual routers, and a virtual load balancer).

And from a backup point of view, my critical items (taxes and the like) are on a separate machine that gets backup up after every use.

Lower extraction times is one of the major benefits I have found with raid 0.

Also since many games accsess the hard drive like crazy on the fly, you can’t just quote map loading times. It will only be a perceived slowdown in certain situations, but they do happen in the midst of actual gameplay.

Elder Scrolls is a fine example of a less then optimized game that really taxes hdd’s.

Nothing of real value is ever on this raid, I use various ide dumps for that.

Here are some real world mb/s numbers:

//begin quote

Anyways, preliminary benchmarks using PC Wizard 2006:

Before: (Western Digital 160GB SATA2 w/NCQ)
Sequential write: 41.6 MB/sec
Sequential read: 51.13 MB/sec
Buffered write: 133.59 MB/sec
Buffered read: 165.28 MB/sec
Random read: 33 MB/sec

After: (Western Digital Hitachi 160GB SATA2 w/NCQ drives, RAID-0)
Sequential write: 58.99 MB/sec
Sequential read: 91.92 MB/sec
Buffered write: 172.51 MB/sec
Buffered read: 193.25 MB/sec
Random read: 32 MB/sec

So according to the benchmarking software, I basically improved by a nice margin across the board:

Sequential write: +41.8%
Sequential read: +79.8%
Buffered write: +29.1%
Buffered read: +16.9%
Random read: -4%
Avg: +32.7%

//end quote

reference:
a href="http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/showpost.php?s=532b3fdc1cad0246bf89a5dd807cc000p=11508postcount=13"http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/showpost.php?s=532b3fdc1cad0246bf89a5dd807cc000p=11508postcount=13/a

I too am considering a RAID 0 setup with two WD SATA RE drives. I have an external drive and will do an OS image as well as regular backups of my “critical” data. I understand the risk but think it is worth it. I’ve never personally had a complete hard drive failure but I’ve seen it several times with friends and family. To the guy who is wanting to do a RAID 0 array with 4 drives… that is a risk I don’t want to take.

In defense of Jeff, the benchmarks you see for RAID 0 will not always translate to a realized gain in performance. Even though the throughput is higher, your computer is not constantly hammering on the HD (or better not be!) Unless you have a small amount of memory, often the real work will be going on in RAM. For normal day-to-day work your HD will be accessing relatively small amounts of data to process in memory.

I can, however, see the benefits during bootup, defrag, large installs, video processing, high-end gaming, etc.

I think it is a personal decision based on your type of PC usage, your technical ability, and your tolerance for dealing with the risk, setup issues, etc.

Does anyone have any experience with setting up your windows swap file on a seaparate drive from your RAID array? Is there any benefit (or detriment)?

I am running windows vista on a raid 0 setup everything runs sweet no probs what so ever and just to let you know My windows experiance score for the hdd went from 5.4 to 5.9 which for me is quite a good improvement and you can see the differance in load times YEAH!!1

My experiences with RAID 0 are very much what you would expect - great “burst” performance for media and virtualization apps (e.g. MS Virtual PC), very little or no difference in gaming (on COD2, Oblivion, Ghost Recon, etc.), but surprisingly boot up seemed a bit quicker with RAID.

My PC is an E6600 w/ 2GB ram, 1 37GB Raptor, 2x Seagate 3200.10 320GB disks. I initially configured my PC with RAID 0, but after reading a few articles decided that the risks outweighed the benefits so I reverted to seperate disks.

Unfortunately, this was on the back of a fairly catastrophic HDD failure in my previous rig, where I lost several months worth of precious photos (happy ending though - managed to replace the PCB on the hard disk and recovered my data!). Lesson learned - I now backup RELIGIOUSLY.

Having sorted my backup strategy, and being an incurable tinkerer, I’m now thinking about switching back again :slight_smile:

I’ve got to tell you, RAID-0 when using two drives does not double your chances of data loss as so many articles state. This one rumor that got started and spread around without any real math put behind it. If the average failure rate of a HDD is 10% in x-number of years (That’s one chance out of ten), then doubling your drives from one to two does not double your risk in losing data. Your risk marginally increases from 10% to about 20% is all. You would literally have to set up 5 drives striped to increase the risk of total data loss to 50% the chance over a single drive. So yes the risk increases some, but not an apocolyptic amount as the naysayers would have you believe.

In defense of Jeff AND LordMax:

I think LordMax is the exactly the kind of guy that jeff IS NOT speaking to when he writes this article.

It’s like when you hear “people shouldn’t pick their own stocks” when there are many people who don’t do it professionally but can do just fine at it. (and vice versa)

People in this “expert” category will balk at the “conventional wisdom” and warnings like Jeff’s, and those found in the articles Jeff cites. Those warnings are to prevent the gadget-hungry psuedo-savvy individuals who know just enough to be very dangerous from jumping on the “double the mean failure time of all your critical data for basically no reason”* bandwagon.

*And that’s not a criticism of RAID0, just a real-world example of what a “typical user” can expect from making the change. Outside of gaming (and even then it varies) and anything but the most causal of video-editing, the average person who doesn’t know what they’re doing should stay away!

@Brian Hampson:

RAID-1 (or any RAID level for that matter) is not backup. RAID will not save you after you rm -rf * in the wrong directory, nor will it help when a file is corrupted as it’s written out to disc.

RAID-1 will only protect you from a drive failure, there is no substituite for a good backup stratergy (except perhaps ZFS?)

Looking at Apache’s sums, I can’t work it out.

In my head
10% = 1 in ten
20% = 2 in ten

I have doubled my chances of a failure.

i.e for every 10 I will have twice as many fails.

Going from 10% to 50% would surely be 5 times as many failures.