To Raid or not to Raid

[Spazmatic]

Hi Guys,

I got a decision to make.

Got a Asus P5b-Plus Vista edition mobo, I have a choice between 3 x ST380815AS drives RAID 0 with onboard controller, or alternitively just keep my current 1 x Seagate 320GB drive in place.

What would you guys reccomend for gaming performance. I have read alot of benchmarks showing really good read/write and burst times, but real world performance is always different.

From my understanding it would affect load times etc, but I am more concerned about overall in game performance with titles such as GTA IV and prototype.

I am not worried about redundancy etc, all important data is on my NAS.

Anyway hints and tips appreciated.

Later

 

[blaaislaai]

Game loading times will be improved, thats the only thing that will affect the performance of games.

Go ahead with the RAID, I'm going to RAID 2x 1TB's soon

 

[SuperAntMD]

According to this the real world performance increase is very very small

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

They basically advised against it because the risk of losing all your data increases for basically no improvement in performance.

 

[Conradl]

Having more disks will always improve disk IO performance, and therefore any task that requires disk IO will see an increase in performance. However, more important than the raw performance increase, is the limiting factor that disk IO has on any application, i.e. is the disk actually contributing to excessive application start time?

You can see this for yourself.

Run perfmon, and load:

Physical disk > Current/average disk queue (for the drive hosting the application),
Physical disk > Disk transfers/sec (for the drive hosting the application).
System > Processor queue length.

Run your application and see which queue climbs, and how your processor and CPU spike. Speeding up disk IO will not significantly improve your CPU utilization, and may actually cause the CPU queue to increase.

So in a nutshell, I would say no massive improvement in load times (your CPU could be the limiting factor); and definitely no improvement in FPS. Of course if you do disk IO intensive work, like a DB, then performance will increase dramatically.

 

[spiderz]

Raid 0 is very fast.
Just remember that you have no data protection. if one drive fails, you loose everything on both. So it's a good setup to have Raid 0 for your OS / programs, and store your data on a separate hdd.
Now think 2x WD velociraptors in Raid 0

 

[davemc]

If you really want improved load times, install 8GB of RAM and use 5GB of that RAM for your game's files and the windows swap file.

 

[Conradl]

Also remember that there are a lot of misconceptions regarding RAID - especially the on-board type.

Firstly, RAID0/RAID1 is not necessarily a performance versus redundancy issue, in the sense that RAID1 is not inherently slow. RAID1 read performance is faster than a single disk, and as fast as RAID1 (RAID1 uses interleaved reads). RAID1 write performance will be as fast as a single disk (technically a little slower, but VERY little), and slower than raid0.

Secondly, the type of disk IO (read/write), the size of IO (cluster size), the nature of the IO (random/sequential) and the actual amount of IO (IOps) will all dictate the type of suitable RAID options.

Thirdly, on-board RAID is NOT hardware raid. The onboard controller does not do RAID calculations - the CPU does these.

If you want to protect your data against a single disk failure, and are prepared to loose a single disks equivalent capacity, then RAID1 is a suitable option. It will offer performance similar to RAID0 - although the real performance increase for casual use will be hardly noticeable....