Single 160 GB or 80 x 2 in RAID

[geek]

Hi.

i am buying a new pc. now i require a little bit help from u guys. which setup of hard disk is better. a single 160gb sata or 2 80 gb sata hdds in a raid array. i want to squeeze the maximum performance out of my system. also are onboard raid controller sufficient for the purpose

 

[swatkat]

Get the verdict from AnandTech itself:-
*www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

Gaming Performance:-
*www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Final verdict:-
*www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

Verdict:-No need for RAID in Desktops,not much increase in performance it reality.

 

[liquid_nitrogen88]

As swatkat mentioned,RAID wont be cost effective for u.If u don’t have critical data(like that concerned with national security ) its useless 2 invest in it.Thats because the main function of RAID is to protect your system from a hard disk drive failure. What we aim is to copy the information on the working drive to at least one back-up drive so that if the working drive fails the system automatically switches over to using the back-up drive.It will increase performance too but not in a way u think.Don’t expect your frame rate in D3 to jump from 40 to 60 once u install raid.
By the way.... have u heard about Intel's new version of RAID - Matrix Storage Technology?Google it…

also are onboard raid controller sufficient for the purpose

Yup....

 

[grinning_devil]

RAID.....for desktop?????
no man...not at all needed.....how many times have ur hard drive crashed????
go for a single drive....whether its 160 or 80....

hey nitro....going for matrix techno. kya??
combining raid 0 nd 1 ...ehh?????
i dont undestand who will benefit from this...not at all an end user...
nd not at all an "Indian" end user....
who wants to waste space on HDD bcoz of RAID 1?????

this idea s*** for desktops...

hey matrix techno will use min of 4 drives....!!
where 2 disks will be on striping...nd thus having 2 sets of striped disks...
nd those 2 striped sets will be mirrored....

:roll: :roll: will sure be costly....not at all in reach of indians.... :roll:

 

[liquid_nitrogen88]

Never yaar.....i just mentioned it bec he can then wait 4 the new tech if he is insisting on RAID....

I'm still wondering wat 2 do with my 80GB....so RAID wont come even in my dreams........ :roll:

But i hav loads of cd's in which i bak up everything n is plannin 2 go 4 a DVD writer soon(market research goin on....)..... .......thats it...i'll start a new thread on it........

 

[funkymonkey]

I have 2x120GB SATA in raid0 and to be honest I am loving every minute of it.
Unless you experience power of raid0 yourself you will never know what difference it makes.
The PC boots at the blink of an eye. 12 seconds flat.
Game load times are less, Data copy is faster. Whole system feels more responsive.
It wont make much difference in most games but in games which load data within level like FarCry and HL2 you wont get stutter with raid0 as much as non raid drive setup.
It comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
The only real disadvantage of raid0 is the failure nightmare.
If any one of your drive fails all data and partitions will be lost.
But I backup my critical data using my CDRW or DVDRW drive.
By the way previously I had ASUS P4P800 motherboard and had raid0 on native chipset raid.
Now I have ASUS A8V deluxe along with A64 3200+ S939 and same two HDDs as raid0 on the VIA raid.
And its as good as it gets.
The promise raid on my Asus A8V is little faster but its not as stable as VIA raid so I am using the VIA raid.
And you did not tell us what motherboard you have. In most cases onboard raid is the fastest and most reliable raid solution as its integrated chipset raid is closest to the chipset and hence less latecies

 

[grinning_devil]

.......thats it...i'll start a new thread on it........

noooo...............nooooooooooooooooooo..........


nahiiiiiin!!!!!!

 

[pradeep_chauhan]

Raid is the way to go it realy sets up the system in nitro mode. I am trying to get a RAID 5 on my system using an adaptec SATA card along with WD 10K disks realy the system goes like a bullet even the thing like gcc on linux speed up a lot so try it if you can afford it (its expensive)

 

[AlienTech]

I been using Raid for a decade now... Or I should say I was...

Raid was really useful when HD's were small in size and I used to have many systems with 4 HD's hooked up in a stripped array to get 12 gigs on line

But its a major headache.. In some cases 2 drives will speed up stuff.. Since the IO is done by 2 different drives... But not always. Having 4 drives did speed up stuff but the heat and power requirements were huge since all 4 drives had to work at the same time. But also the drives used smaller caches and IO was slow as well.

After seeing India, I have to go with reliability should be priority #1 in any case. IE anything that reduces reliability should be discarded. Using 2 drives mean it takes more power and more load on the UPS and less backup time. Also means more things that can go wrong. But not only power but the climate and environment are very hard on equipment.

So unless you want a Triga Byte storage system, just use single drives.. The are now available up to 400gigs per drive.. And SCSI and higher RPM's also speed up stuff, Not for sequential file xfers but for things like compiling a large program or database.



If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop. Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.


*www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

 

[liquid_nitrogen88]

we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop. Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.

i must agree with you 100%......

 

[TheGuru]

I am not sure of the performance offered by RAID-0. All I care about is reliability (RAID-1). Trust me, I have seen bad things. Can't think of a day when my harddisk crashes and I have to lose __everything__ I have??!!?? 80 GB worth of data? No way yo! (This did happen to me once and I lost around 20GB of data). Even if it means that I have to shell out 4K more.
BTW, read performance is better in case of RAID-1 though write performance will decrease. I don't think I'll be moving around data that much and even then, I didn't see any performance decrease. Games do load a lot of data from the disk and it all looks faster. Swapping? Not an issue if you have 1GB RAM

 

[TheGuru]

RAID.....for desktop?????
no man...not at all needed.....how many times have ur hard drive crashed????
go for a single drive....whether its 160 or 80....

hey nitro....going for matrix techno. kya??
combining raid 0 nd 1 ...ehh?????
i dont undestand who will benefit from this...not at all an end user...
nd not at all an "Indian" end user....
who wants to waste space on HDD bcoz of RAID 1?????

this idea s*** for desktops...

Prevention is better than cure.
It isn't that you will catch the disease. It isn't that you won't. But, you don't get vaccinated for nothing.
The bottomline: how much do you value the data you have on those disks?

 

[funkymonkey]

well you can never say something is not needed or some things are unnacessary.
Now if you guys look at my PC config, many will say its unnacessary expensive PC. Its personal view.
If you have the money to get 2 HDDs then setting up raid stripping for best performance is what you should do.
I have spent 80K on my PC. Spending Rs.50 more to backup my Data on DVD-R and CD RW is no big deal for me.
For 10 days I had to setup my system in non-raid config as my 1 HDD went for replacement and those 10 days really sucked. I was too used to fast booting, faster game load times.
Decide what you want. its not that 1 HDD is reliable. If it fails you are dead duck in water anyway.
Samw with raid0. If 1 HDD fails you loose all your data.
If you want most reliable system then you should use Raid1 config insted.
Raid0 gives best performance and its as stable and safe as single HDD.
And where I live in Mumbai there is no power problems. I hardly get any power cuts.
But 1 HDD wont make too big difference to your UPS backup time.
And UPS is there to allow you to safely save your data and turn your PC off and 1 HDDs wont make much of difference.

 

[grinning_devil]

we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop. Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.

i must agree with you 100%......

agree 200% with both of u.....