RAID 0 and the Raptors

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daysleeper

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There is a thread on THG newsgroups along the lines of which is better a Raptor (10K/74GB) or RAID0 twin Seagate (7,2K/80GB).

Okay... you can easily pick up two seagates for the price of the WD, so RAID0 is cheaper if your board supports it. Secondaly you have 150GB instead of 74GB. Thirdly its much faster. The only problem is redancy or lack thereof.

Now the thing is this, why is it such a moot point in O'C' and modding circles. I just installed the RAID0 and sisoft 2005 file system bench says my array is running at 95 MB/s nero 7 says 107 MB/S cache speed.

So why is raid 0 so frowned upon if the equipment is main stream, the performance is great?

So what if WD Raptor has a five year warranty, I replace drives every easter anyway and have never had a problem! touch wood.
 
I am not sure what your question is exactly, but raid 0 is famous with its performance.

I am getting about 105 MB/s on sisoft sandra on my raid 0 with 2 x Hitachi 250GB SATA II drives, cost me less than R2000 for near half terabyte, not bad
 
Raid 0 doubles the chance of a failure causing total loss of data. If one drive is a Raid 0 array fails, all data on all the drives in the array is lost. It is all nasty statistics. For example if a single drive had a 5% (just a random value I picked) chance to let you loose all your data in a given year, then a Raid 0 array has a 2 X 5% = 10% chance to let you loose all your data. That is why Raid 0 is only really recommended for for drives that contain temporary data, e.g. the work files while one is busy editing a video etc. I personally do not think it it worth the risk for data one actually wants to keep.
 
gkm said:
Raid 0 doubles the chance of a failure causing total loss of data. If one drive is a Raid 0 array fails, all data on all the drives in the array is lost. It is all nasty statistics. For example if a single drive had a 5% (just a random value I picked) chance to let you loose all your data in a given year, then a Raid 0 array has a 2 X 5% = 10% chance to let you loose all your data. That is why Raid 0 is only really recommended for for drives that contain temporary data, e.g. the work files while one is busy editing a video etc. I personally do not think it it worth the risk for data one actually wants to keep.
Click to expand...
I don't agree 100%, although you are correct about the risk

The chance of a drive failing completely those days is much less than the chance of being robbed and your PC being stolen! Most drives fail progressively over time, becoming slower, noisy, having bad sectors etc. If you using SMART to monitor your drive healt, the chance of complete sudden failure of a drive is much less than being fried by a lightening or being stolen, so no much point in worrying that much about that.

Obviously it is not advisable you are keeping very critical data on those drives, I for example keep most of my data on a PC which is used as a server only, so I am not playing around with it too much. While I am using raid 0 on my desktop to get some serious performance.

anyway, only way to really protect your data is to back it up on either dvds or tapes and store it an off site location.
 
Just to be sure cause I haven't really worked with this yet:

RAID0 = Two drives (??same size??) working together to be faster.
RAID1 = Two drives (??don't really have to be same size??) where one is a mirror for the other, so if one fails the other takes over.

Is this right?
 
Toxin said:
Just to be sure cause I haven't really worked with this yet:

RAID0 = Two drives (??same size??) working together to be faster.
RAID1 = Two drives (??don't really have to be same size??) where one is a mirror for the other, so if one fails the other takes over.

Is this right?
Click to expand...
yes it is right and in both cases it is preferable that the drives are the same size
 
people don't agree

If you look at these sites you'll notice that raid 0 is not given its due i think. I think it make a big difference to performance.

I have read many articles on the net that suggest that base is actually the better option.

I'll stick to my raid 0, i like it!
 
swordfish1 said:
If you using SMART to monitor your drive healt, the chance of complete sudden failure of a drive is much less than being fried by a lightening or being stolen, so no much point in worrying that much about that.
Click to expand...

BTW, do u know of any tools to monitor the SMART data if you are running RAID0? I couldn't get through to it, and would really love to.
 
SMART is not really dependend on your RAID configuration, problem is that OS doesn't see the disk as normal SATA disk when you run RAID, hence it is unable to give you the information

I am using hitachi deskstar and they have a utility which you can download from their web site (www.hitachigst.com) that you can make a bottable CD from. Then you boot from it and you check your drives SMART status, temperature etc. I know it isn't very useful as it requires restart, but I haven't found anything else yet. I am also interested finding something that works under linux without restart.

the hitachi utility seems to work for other brands as well, I have one old maxtor and it seems to be handled fine by the utility
 
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