IDE RAID

[copaceticKid]

my friend says these two words should not belong in the same sentence...<BR><BR>i just bought two maxtor 40 gb hds and i'm going to set up a RAID 0 array with them (they are ide)<BR><BR>but my friend tells me that ide raid *reading* is no faster than with one drive and only *writing* is faster. 90% of the time you're reading from the hd so this makes me worried...<BR><BR>are there any raid experts out there? help!

[Joe]

raid will be faster then just one drive for read and write .. but it willnot be double the speed .. in some cases it can be near double the speed .. but it never will be. <BR><BR>Basicaly raid is great for combining drives if you dont want to have two seperate drives. <BR><BR>scsi raid is faster .. actually its a boat load faster lol .. but that is just two expensive. <BR><BR>basically if you do photoshop .. video editing .. etc etc. thats where you will notice the difference in speed. but if you are just a gamer and surf the net .. you wont really notice a difference

[copaceticKid]

joe, do you have an ide raid array? cause my friend seems adamant that if you making an ide array, it basically is <b>no</b> faster than using one hd itself<BR><BR>so i guess my real question is: is the performance increase from a single ide hd to a raid 0 ide array proportional to one scsi hd->scsi raid array?<BR><BR><BR><BR>oh and also, once you have an array up and running, does windows and such see it as one hd? cause i wanna make two partitions on my array (if the array turns out bad, i'll just use the two drives independantly). i'm assuming it prolly makes os's a b!tch to install too...anyone?

[zogmool]

Your friend is very wrong.<BR><BR>Your settup will improve both reading and writing speed, but there will be twice the likelyhood of loosing data.<BR><BR>*Incase those were your friend's exact words, beware people who say "basicaly" often. <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif" border="0"><BR><BR>Try reading this:<BR>http://www.raidtoolbox.com/raidinfo.html

[Juan]

Raid is faster than just having 1HD by far!! I have 2 Western Digital 40Gb Caviar's at ATA/100 and I can tell a significant increase in access time compared to the time I had just 1 40GB on my Abit board. You know with XP when it boots up you have the status bar going across. With 1 drive in that bar went across between 4-6 times but with Array 0 it takes 2-3 times..theres your difference.

[copaceticKid]

thanks Juan, i'll let you all know how it turns out if i can actually get it to work (1st time with raid). btw, any tips on setting up an array and conflicts with os's?

[Juan]

With my abit board all I had to do is wait for the boot process when it gets to the Raid bootup and hit Ctrl+H. The only problem I have had is when I did the last bios update it updated the RAID chipset. I had to go through Highpoint to find a driver for it when I formated my computer because the RAID ID and driver didn't match so XP kept crying about that when running through setup. The driver update fixed it.

[Avid6eek]

<i>"Raid is faster than just having 1HD by far!! I have 2 Western Digital 40Gb Caviar's at ATA/100 and I can tell a significant</i> <b>increase</b> <i>in access time compared to the time I had just 1 40GB on my Abit board. You know with XP when it boots up you have the status bar going across. With 1 drive in that bar went across between 4-6 times but with Array 0 it takes 2-3 times..theres your difference."</i> <BR><BR>I think what you meant to say is a significant decrease in access time, and even that is wrong. With a RAID 0 configuration it takes the same amount of time to access the harddrives, but once they are accessed it can theoretically have twice the bandwith. There are many cases when RAID is no faster than one single hard drive. The two WD 40GB HD's on RAID 0 will run no faster in 99% of applications than a single 120GB WD SE HD (8MB Cache). The 120GB IBM Deskstar is also compareable to RAID configs of smaller HD's and is even faster than the WD SE. Personally I find the $147 price of the 120GB Deskstar to be cheaper than two WD 40GBs with a RAID controller, and it will perform just as fast, or even faster most of the time.

[Avid6eek]

Where is the wise ass comment Pimpin Joe??? :-p

[copaceticKid]

thanks shiznit, that was what i thought/feared... too bad i already got my two hds... ************************

[Joe]

hehe sorry shiznit .. been selling my shiznit off <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-happy.gif" border="0"> <BR><BR>OK, foos ... heres the deal ... hehehe<BR><BR>I have had several raid arrays ranging from 2 drives , 3 drives , and 4 drives .. in a raid configuration. alll performed about the same as a normal 2 drive configuration setup that most people have. <BR><BR>you will see a performance increase over just one drive .. which i believe the increase can be as high as 90% .. .. but that rarely happens. If you want to cram every last ounce of speed out of them drives i suggest you going with a controller card for this setup<BR><BR>the difference between a scsi raid setup and a ide is huge! .. scsi is just all around faster then ide ..and when you put them in raid it will just plain rip ide a new hole... reason being - ... scsi was design to be linked together in the first place.. and ide was not .. ide drives can only send one at a time on each cable .. so thats why you wont see a bigger performance increase with more then two drives ... as for the the raid setup being just as fast as a 8meg cache 120gig wd .. i seriously doubt that 120 gig is faster or fast as the raid setup would be. Its still a ata100 drive and and is takin in all the data unlike raid which takes half here and half there. (btw if you are not familar with raid thats how it gets it performance increase) <BR><BR>I personally would liket o see harddrives start to be made in a IEEE 1394 connection ... that is soon to be the next scsi .. if not already is for perifials. <BR><BR>So to answer your question about raid <BR><BR>1 you still hav to fdisk the array and format it after you set it up .. so you can make it as many drives as you want windows to see it as lol<BR><BR>2. raid is faster in soem applications and it is the same as one hdd in others .. you will see the difference in game load times.. but you will see the biggest and best performance of the raid setup happening when you are doing graphics and such programs like that .. .. pretty much programs that have to write a lot of information. <BR><BR>Now .. one final note ... if any of this dont make one bit of sense .. i will explain it later .,.. i am dead tired now lol

[Avid6eek]

I'm just going to share some information from <i>Maximum PC</i> since I don't have the time right now to look for it online<BR><BR>DRIVE(S) HD TACH READS HD TACH WRITES<BR>1 40.3 MB/sec 29.9 MB/sec<BR>2 (RAID 0) 39.0 MB/sec 28.7 MB/sec<BR>4 (RAID 0) 27.2 MB/sec 32.0 MB/sec<BR><BR> This shows that RAID 0 drive do write faster, while single drives read faster. I don't know what's important to you, but I'd rather be able to load files fast, as compared to installing and saving files.<BR><BR> 2MB Cache 8MB Cache<BR>HD Tach Avg. 37.3 MB/sec 37.5 MB/sec<BR>HD Tach Min. 4 MB/sec 18.1 MB/sec<BR>SYSmark2001 OA 162 171<BR><BR>More Cache, more performance....unfortuantly this mag. doesn't have benchmarks for RAID 0 with 8MB Cache HD's. I'm still going to stick with my original opinion. The single 120GB HD will run faster for less, and on top of that, it'll have 1/3 more space than your 2 40GB HDs.<BR><BR>