RAID question

ietermago · May 24, 2006

If I create a striped RAID array on a PC with NVidia RAID and move the harddisks (SATA2) to a PC with Intel RAID, will it still work?

werner · May 24, 2006

Azrael · May 24, 2006

werner said:
no

ditto

daysleeper · May 24, 2006

not a chance!

start again!

i've tried it and it doesn't work!

you have to start from scratch if you change controllers

ietermago · May 24, 2006

I had a sneaky suspicion that might be the case. Thanks guys.

mic_y · May 25, 2006

another major disadvantage of RAID... u cant just remove ur HDD, take it to ur friends, and copy stuff onto it

Gunny · May 25, 2006

Why use RAID on a home machine ?

James · May 25, 2006

mic_y said:
another major disadvantage of RAID... u cant just remove ur HDD, take it to ur friends, and copy stuff onto it

That is a very broad statement. I could also say, RAID is nice cause I can remove my hard drive and take it to my friends with out turning my PC out.

There are probably close on 10 difference types of RAID all have their advantages and disadvantages. RAID 0 Stripping for home use doesn't have to many positives though I am afraid

andres101 · May 25, 2006

James said:
RAID 0 Stripping for home use doesn't have to many positives though I am afraid

/me put flame resistant cap on
It actually does! the biggest bottleneck on most PC's nowadays is the hdd. striping gives a nice performance boost. especially so if you don't have >1GB of memory (for use as disk cache).

appications like Photoshop and (large pst) outlook will run much faster if you have a fast hdd.

i'm actually considering getting another 4 300Gb SATA drives to set up RAID5 on my mythtv box. just don't have the cash now...

James · May 25, 2006

andres101 said:
/me put flame resistant cap on
It actually does! the biggest bottleneck on most PC's nowadays is the hdd. striping gives a nice performance boost. especially so if you don't have >1GB of memory (for use as disk cache).

appications like Photoshop and (large pst) outlook will run much faster if you have a fast hdd.

i'm actually considering getting another 4 300Gb SATA drives to set up RAID5 on my mythtv box. just don't have the cash now...

Please educate me or just humour me, either one, and let me know the benifits of RAID 0 stripping for your average home user?

stoke · May 25, 2006

STRIPING : Loading a BF2 map will be 1.4 times faster on a striped set than on a single disk. Proved this on a Gigabyte Motherboard's SATA Hardware Raid.

MIRRORING : Loading a BF2 map will be 1.5 times faster on a striped set than on a single disk. Proved this on a Gigabyte Motherboard's SATA Hardware Raid.

I use mirroring cos I'm tired of reinstalling cos of disk failures - the performance advantage is a bonus.

telkomsuig · May 25, 2006

I've been toying with the idea of doing mirroring on my pc. Do i need to do a fresh installl to this or can i do it by enableing mirroring and obviously adding the extra disk.

willirob · May 25, 2006

errrr - how does mirroring improve performance - just for redundancy methought

*EDIT*

Unless you stripe as well

fishfly · May 25, 2006

Urm correction guys! When you create a RAID array using a Nvidia chipset YOU can still move the RAID set across to a different motherboard - provided that the motherboard has the SAME RAID controllers...

i.e moving from a nvidia nforce 3 motherboard with a nvidia RAID controller over to a nforce 4 motherboard will still work - the controller can pickup which drive is plugged in which (if you swap the cabling around)

but moving from a Silicon image controller to a nvidia conotroller would result you in recreating the raid again.

Mirroring does NOT improve the performance of a RAID set in fact in most cases it reduces the performace of the raid - why? Firstly it takes a couple of I/O to duplicate everything that is created in the original drive a Mirror image means it duplicates everything in the orginial drive.

STRIPING : Loading a BF2 map will be 1.4 times faster on a striped set than on a single disk. Proved this on a Gigabyte Motherboard's SATA Hardware Raid.

somewhat a myth... a Striping raid only benefits sequential reads to the disc but random reads from the drive would not be benefitted.

in most cases there is generaelly an overall improvement in read/writes when using a RAID 0 set but in practice don't expect double the performace.

stoke · May 25, 2006

I have proved my comments.

NOTE: During a BF2 map load the following happens: A BF2 map is one large contiguous file - which is loaded and processed into the patterns for the Graph Card while it loads. Then Punkbuster gets to read just about every file in the BF2 folder and calculate checksums on these files to compare with the expected checksums [proove that the files have not been modified].

BF2's load time is perfect for RAID style optimisation.

Mirror :- will improve the speed of reads because 2 drives can and will [iff your HW is clever enough] be used to read different parts of the same file at the same time. Writing is not slower it is the same speed as a normal one disk write. Mirror = RAID 1.

Cool ?

andres101 · May 25, 2006

James said:
Please educate me or just humour me, either one, and let me know the benifits of RAID 0 stripping for your average home user?

Previously it was "home use", now it is "average home user". make up your mind!

the average home user does not have a 2Gb PST file, doesn't play disk intensive games and doesn't edit graphics in photoshop.

James · May 25, 2006

andres101 said:
Previously it was "home use", now it is "average home user". make up your mind!

the average home user does not have a 2Gb PST file, doesn't play disk intensive games and doesn't edit graphics in photoshop.

Well I was also talking about RAID 0 and then you throw in that u want RAID 5... make up your mind!

You should read this article it is good http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

I especially liked their conclusion

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.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.

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.

mic_y · May 25, 2006

Ummm, well from my experience this is not true.

Installing 'doze on a system without RAID: 30 minutes
Installing 'doze on a system with RAID-0: 19 minutes

This is personally tested. Otherwise, the whole computer feels a lot more responsive esp when i have a lot of stuff open. Any application that chows 700-800MB RAM will benefit. Now I know these are very nieche applications (Protel DXP, Mentor software) for hardware design, as soon as disk swapping does occur, the performance benefit is very tangible.

So yes, it isn't worth it for everyone, but for ppl who do use 60-70% of avaliable physical memory while not even playing games, it does help.

ietermago · May 25, 2006

Gunny said:
Why use RAID on a home machine ?

Video editing

andres101 · May 26, 2006

James said:
Well I was also talking about RAID 0 and then you throw in that u want RAID 5... make up your mind!

i mentioned that i was considering using RAID5 in my mythtv box (because of the redundency). that does not take anything away from my post (regarding striping RAID0).

anybody who knows how to google can find an article that proves their point... whether it is correct or not.

you've stated your point, i've stated mine. this will be my last post in this thread.

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