RAID0 is a bad idea, that is the only part that is right. with high failure rates and cheap disks, having a REDUNDANT array of disks is a good idea. a very cost effective solution is linux raid10 or raid5. redundancy in raid is of course no substitution for regular backups.
hey ive read all your comments and im going to still try raid 0
. It is amazing to hear all this arguement about RAID. RAID, by any means, is not for the inexperienced. RAID level 1 is okay, if you have critical data you must not lose and have to keep a machine running 24/7.
. Getting to RAID 0; yes, you will see an improvement in performance, and yes, you will see better throughput. If you decide on that, please be sure to have a backup drive of some sort to keep your data safe, for if you lose a drive, you lose it all.
. RAID 5 is something I would recommend entirely. Especially if you have to keep a system running 24/7. Even if you do have a hard drive failure, you can shut down and hotswap a drive, rebuild AS your system remains running. This is crucial for servers. With a RAID 5 setup, you still gain performance over a single drive system.
. I don’t quite understand the 0 + 1 plan. I guess if you want superfast performance in parallel, I guess it’s ok. But now you are just running two RAID 0 arrays with mirroring. I believe I would still find some sort of backup plan for that.
. All RAID level configurations are serious and not for the inexperienced user. Even with a RAID 5 setup, you should still have some sort of backup plan.
That’s my two bits, resume arguing.
I tried RAID 0 about three years ago when I built my computer. I disagree about the performance: it was fantastic. So much better than a single drive. Mostly I was doing graphic design work, but also doing a lot of gaming.
Alas, one drive error later and I was stuck redoing the entire OS. I knew what I was getting into, though, with the RAID and so I was prepared with a backup. When I redid the system, I decided to forgo the RAID. Result? A substantially slower system. But nearly two years after the reinstall, I’ve not had any reliability issues.
If you’re looking for speed, even on a desktop system, I’d recommend a RAID. But go with RAID 5 if you can (it’s more expensive to do so, of course).
I’ve been using a Western Digital 1 TB USB drive for the last two months as my primary repository, connected to an HP Pavilion zv6000 with 1 GB RAM, 100 GB HD.
I have it configured for RAID 1
I’ve been pleased with it so far.
RAID1 is GREAT for desktop–both speed and safety–with a price. RAID1 seems to be confused with RAID0. RAID1 is much better for C: than RAID0.
RAID0 is a poor term! It is not redundant, increases failure risk, and not significantly faster for C: drive (random access).
However, RAID choice depends on your use: random/sequential, read/write.
RAID0 - Bad idea for OS, good for data.
RAID0 (striping) takes two drives and interleaves data between them to result in one larger drive. It can nearly double read/write throughput, but only if files are larger than one stripe (usually 64/128 KB). It is a terrible choice for your OS (C:) drive because most system files are small, Windows in particular. Every icon on your desktop is a small chunk of a file and requires loading. How about every tiny little registry access? Ever seen the thousands of DLL files in your System32 folder? Largely under 64K. Hear how your drive thrashes wildly at boot? Lots of small files. This is called random access. RAID0 is terrible for random access–one drive does the work and the other sits idle.
RAID0 for sequential access (large files read contiguously) is a good choice! The two drives operate in tandem reading one file. Using RAID0 for large photos or videos that need to be accessed quickly is a good choice.
RAID1 - USE THIS FOR WINDOWS!!!
RAID1 (mirroring) makes a duplicate copy on two identical drives. You now have failure safety, and it is also MUCH FASTER for your OS. Faster than a single drive, faster than RAID0. Faster than RAID5.
Because of mostly reading many small files, RAID1 is nearly twice as fast because each drive can independently read files at the same time. Use 10,000 rpm (or greater) drives to reduce seek times and both drives will be working together like lightning!
RAID1 falls down during writes when both drives must do the same thing. RAID1 does not help with large sequential accesses because the second drive has nothing to do. Don’t use RAID1 for video editing. Use RAID1 for your boot drive! RAID1 is a good choice for data, though, if nothing other than to provide redundancy.
RAID 0+1 - Have your cake and eat it too
Combines a mirrored set of striped volumes (4 drives). Best of both worlds, but likely that only two drives will be working at a time (either the striped drives in tandem or the mirrored drives independently). If you can afford it…
RAID 5 - Worst choice of all for Windows drive
RAID5 is basically RAID0 with redundancy by dispersing data stripes over 3+ drives. Without a hardware XOR unit, it is slow. RAID5 excels and suffers exactly where RAID0 does. It is GREAT for huge, large sequential reads, less great for writes (because the XOR calculations required), and stinks badly for random access. It’s a horrible choice for a boot drive!
If you have money to spend on drives, I’d proceed in this order:
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http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html - keep the C: drive small and don’t fragment other data into your OS files. A huge drive increases seek times.
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RAID1 on C:, separate drive for data.
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RAID1 on C:, RAID0 or 1 for data depending on your data and your desire for safety.
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RAID0+1
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Separate drive(s) for swapfile.
If you can only afford one large drive, partition it out so C: is only OS and programs, the other volume for data. That keeps the OS files on the outer part of the drive (which is slightly faster) and prevents inter-fragmentation of data.
Putting “Program Files” on a separate volume makes restoration more difficult and really doesn’t do that much–programs install many files in the System32 directory. If you restore/reinstall windows you’ll still need to reinstall your programs.
DEFRAG often in any case.
igood backup regimen/i
Out of curiousity, could you describe your backup regimen, software/hardware recommendations, etc?
Thanks.
Have run many different raid configs on dozens of systems. For the average home user… it makes no real difference to the experience. They would be better off getting Geeks Squad or someone like that to disable all automatic services and uneeded startup programs.
The only true reason for a raid 0 config is the need for one large volume to ease the burden of data managment. I am currently running 4 Seagate SataII 1TB drives. Drive in port 0 is Vista OS…non raid (backup after install of any new program or after upload of vaction vids or picts etc.
The remaining 3TBs (ports 1-3) are used as my movie server for the rest of the house. I got very tired of juggling movie genres from drive to drive to make an entire genre fit in a single folder on a single drive with another large folder maxing the drive space. 3 Drives, 3 TB no worries. As far as backups… I have the original DVDs anyways.
everything I read tells me something different, including expert reviews. soooo annoying.
even my sisoft sandra says a couple raid 0’s would be much faster than a single raptor
The key of the problem is random access.
RAID 0 will not halve the random access time.
And random access is way more often than sequential access on a desktop PC. That’s why raid 0 is useless for desktop.
Ask yourself, How often you read a N GB file? How often you read small files? N-GB file is read sequentially. Small files are random accessed.
Really wanna fast performance? Use solid state harddisk. It is freaking expensive. But it does probive shortest random access time!
I agree with all of the tech advice here. After having built 2 raid 0 systems with amd and intel chipsets, I have come to the conclusion that I see no appreciable speed gains in real time use. I have bench marked all five of my systems with 3d mark and although the raid 0 systems always mark higher, it is like trying to appreciate refresh rates above 75 hertz. I cant hear a dog whistle either but my dog can. Oh and both raid systems locked up after two years due to sudden power surges or outages, even though they were apc’d. I have gamed the crap out of my raid systems and cannot differentiate from the non raid ones. I still have one raid system that has nothing but games and an internet connection. If it crashes who cares, I just re-load the os and third party drivers. It has become my Frankenstein disposable data computer. I am trying to overclock it until something burns before it blue screens.
Last year I decided to add 4GB RAM in my Debian Desktop, up to 6GB, in the hope that the extra RAM will be filled by disk cache and also prevent swapping.
I’m more than pleased with the result ! Since the uptime is regularly up to 40-60 days, the disk cache have more than enough time to fill and be really useful. This means that the weekly average block read on disk is now as low as one 512 bytes block read per second. Block writes are at 56 per second now, but they are all asynchronous.
This basically means that after booting and using the computer for 1 day, everything is in RAM. Everyone knows RAM beats any particular disk or RAID setup.
The agressive disk cache of Linux is a real gain here. No matter the actual disk, performance is always at the top.
I just built a computer about 2 months ago, and I considered doing RAID 0, but I decided against it for the reasons you’ve cited here.
I think a close parallel right now also, is nVidia’s SLi and ATI’s Crossfire technologies. The performance advantage gained from daisy-chaining two video cards together is no where near worth the cost involved. The primary difference between this and RAID 0, is that the dual video card setup is likely to improve as more games begin to support it, whereas the downsides of RAID 0 are unlikely to go away anytime soon.
All in all, it really depends on what your needs are. If you absolutely must have a great deal of speed, and you’re not concerned about data integrity, go ahead and RAID it. If you’d like a boost in speed, but are concerned about integrity, just step up to a drive that spins at 10k rpm. If you’re ultimate concern is data integrity, then you might consider RAID 1. Most motherboards that support a RAID setup at all will be able to do it as well as RAID 0, and you’re much less likely to lose any of that data.
Something I don’t know much about is RAID 0+1. Just by the suffix, it sounds like it would require 4 disks, but I’m just talking out my ass on that.
Thanks for the good thoughts, and the links. Last December I bought and assembled a new home-brewed gaming rig. I was shooting for a combination of fast and quiet. (My last desktop was obnoxiously loud.)
One additional consideration to think about, therefore, is noise. I thought that I could get a good noise-performance ratio by going with two quiet SATA hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration.
However, since they’re both being accessed at the same time, they actually seem to increase the noise. (Especially when the “clank” over to a new sector/track/whatever in unison.) They also increase the case temperature, to some extent, by having multiple drives.
I had assumed that I had at least obtained a significant performance increase. From the AnandTech article, I see that that’s probably illusory.
Ok so I run Raid0 on two WD SATA drives. Since I first started using it I have had 5 crashes. These 5 crashes resulted in the following:
- 3 HDD drive replacements
- 4 motherboard replacements including switching from AMD to Intel
- Countless OS re-installs
- Countless re-activation of Raid array
- PC spent 1.5 months in a shop while we tried to source identical motherboard
PC is used for games. Not really sure how much of a performance increase RAID0 is but right now its 12:39am. I have been trying to get my PC up and running…after it crashed 1 week after getting it back from the 1.5 month stay at the PC shop. I have had enough. Kicked the PC across the room the last time this happen (not scientific and no damage to PC - 15kg thermaltake case with all the bits and pieces). Left me with a sliced toe but the satisfaction was enormous)…wife walks in and says…“baby, just go buy what you need for Raid5…”. Got to love her. So I am going to go back to standard SATA and use my 300 SATA 2 drive for games. I worked for Microsoft for 4 years…resigned to sell motorcycles because I hate working with PC’s…seems to be the right decision.
elton - still a PC junkie
1 x HP notebook
1 x Acer notebook
1 x LG notebook
1 x Media Center PC
1 x Storage server
1 x AMD games PC
1 x Intel games PC
Big Deal; so you are first in the arena. How much sooner? A seC?
This means nothing, other then you spended lots of cash, to gain a few secs.
Hardocp (or was it tomshardwaRE?) have made a nice review, tested loading times for games and overall RAID did NOT help much, if any.
Also, most RAID-wannabee’s run it with the onboard crap. RAID can be good, but only when you know WHY you should have it, know what you need for it and know how to use it. Most of the RAID lovers don’t come futher then point 3. Lots of them say; for gaming. Now that’s a joke, gaming performanve gains are neglectible.
What do you get is much harder configuration to control, less flexible and less reliable. Good luck!
Has anyone actually recovered their data themselves from a RAID0 failure? I see there are some apps out there (e.g., RAID Reconstructor) that seem relatively safe to try, but I’m nervous about losing data.
[A data recovery shop quoted me a very high dollar amount.]
Any experience either way?
Thanks