Raid 0 - Is it worth it?

[D0M1N13]

Hello All!

First let me get out of the way my rig specification:

Processor: i7-3930K
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Motherboard: Asus P9x79 Deluxe
Storage: 1 Samsung 850 PRO (512GB) 1 Samsung 860 PRO (512GB)
Graphic Card: Radeon HD 7970 GHZ Edition

Now that is out of the way, I am thinking about doing a RAID 0 setup but I don't know if it is worth it. I have looked on youtube and on the internet and from what I concluded is that the Sequential reads are double but the 4K reads are not that much of an improvement. Maybe 5% of an improvement as I saw. What I will be doing on this computer of mine is photo editing and using Photoshop and Lightroom and maybe other photo editors. I will not be doing video rendering or editing. Just use my rig for photo editing activities mainly. In my case, is it worth it? Would I see any benefit from it? Would love to read your opinions and also your help.

 

[andy_mk3]

Not worth it. Buy an NVMe drive if you want pure IOPs. Assuming your board doesn't have an M.2 slot, you can buy a PCI-E adaptor for it, but you wont be able to boot from it. To be hones though, for photo editing, a regular SATA SSD like you have should be ample.

 

[Tetras]

Do you know where exactly the bottleneck is (i.e. what you're spending time waiting for?)? I'd be surprised if the SSD was the bottleneck.

 

[D0M1N13]

Do you know where exactly the bottleneck is (i.e. what you're spending time waiting for?)? I'd be surprised if the SSD was the bottleneck.

Why do you think the Samsung SSD is the bottleneck?

 

[Meddling-Monk]

Why do you think the Samsung SSD is the bottleneck?

@Tetras isn't saying the SSD is the bottleneck, rather they are saying it'll be surprising if it was, so there is less reason to go with RAID0.

Looking at your system, it's fairly close to what I started my current rig with. And if there's any bottleneck in that configuration, it'll be RAM, or more specifically, how much you have. The OS will take some up, and then apps will take some more, as well as (background) services. Then Photoshop itself will need some as well. So on large or dense images, that might be more of a noticable bottleneck as it needs to resort to the scratch disk.

And I too agree with Tetras and that going RAID0 is unlikely to make things better. If you really want a boost, @no idea what suggestion of going with a NVMe drive would also do, but I personally would increase the RAM you have first. 16GB is starting to get a little sparse these days for more complex workloads.

 

[D0M1N13]

@Tetras isn't saying the SSD is the bottleneck, rather they are saying it'll be surprising if it was, so there is less reason to go with RAID0.

Looking at your system, it's fairly close to what I started my current rig with. And if there's any bottleneck in that configuration, it'll be RAM, or more specifically, how much you have. The OS will take some up, and then apps will take some more, as well as (background) services. Then Photoshop itself will need some as well. So on large or dense images, that might be more of a noticable bottleneck as it needs to resort to the scratch disk.

And I too agree with Tetras and that going RAID0 is unlikely to make things better. If you really want a boost, @no idea what suggestion of going with a NVMe drive would also do, but I personally would increase the RAM you have first. 16GB is starting to get a little sparse these days for more complex workloads.

Thank you for explaining it to me @Meddling-Monk
If the RAM is the bottleneck, I would probably have to invest in 32GB. This computer I have build in 2011 so one more year and it's going to be 10 years. I give it another 10 years

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Your storage is not likely to be the bottleneck of the system when dealing with photos (video perhaps, but not photos) nor would you realise much improvement by upgrading it.

Typical RAW file is Les than 50meg and typical harddrive let along SSD is greater than 50meg per second. ... It'll be reading that image in in less than 1 second. The rest of the time you wait will be the CPU /Gpu churning the data to displaying it.

Similarly, edits in LR and PS will rely more in the CPU/GPU to display and not your storage.

It's been a while since I looked at it, but it's my understanding that LR and PS favoured higher frequency over number of cores although as time has gone on, I think that more and more programs are making use of higher core counts and that will be balancing out.

Also GPU acceleration is not the single solution to best performance either. So whacking in a top spec graphics card will not get you top spec performance all round either (it'll help in some but not all areas) . That being said, a modern GPU may improve performance and screen updating responsiveness.

Memory, perhaps it'll help in some areas. That being said, when I ran light room and Photoshop I didn't really see my ram use go past 14gb. 32gb would give a decent amount of headroom, but you wouldn't need more than that.

 

[D0M1N13]

Your storage is not likely to be the bottleneck of the system when dealing with photos (video perhaps, but not photos) nor would you realise much improvement by upgrading it.

Typical RAW file is Les than 50meg and typical harddrive let along SSD is greater than 50meg per second. ... It'll be reading that image in in less than 1 second. The rest of the time you wait will be the CPU /Gpu churning the data to displaying it.

Similarly, edits in LR and PS will rely more in the CPU/GPU to display and not your storage.

It's been a while since I looked at it, but it's my understanding that LR and PS favoured higher frequency over number of cores although as time has gone on, I think that more and more programs are making use of higher core counts and that will be balancing out.

Also GPU acceleration is not the single solution to best performance either. So whacking in a top spec graphics card will not get you top spec performance all round either (it'll help in some but not all areas) . That being said, a modern GPU may improve performance and screen updating responsiveness.

Memory, perhaps it'll help in some areas. That being said, when I ran light room and Photoshop I didn't really see my ram use go past 14gb. 32gb would give a decent amount of headroom, but you wouldn't need more than that.

Thanks for the info.

Well, I'll work with what I got. I might overclock my i7-3930K, right now I have it set at 3.2GHz (the base rate) but might up to 3.8GHz. I will have to look into overclocking this processor and setting the right parameters for it.

My Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is no doubt a good graphics card but as time goes on and the applications are getting heavier and intensive, then it looks like my graphics card is miles away. As you pointed out, GPU will help in some areas but not all. I don't know if I will upgrade my GPU as it can handle 4K videos and it's not that slow but maybe 5 years down the road, it will be time to think of an upgrade.

For RAM, I might hold off for another 3 years. We will see.

As for the storage, I think I will make a cache disk of my Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB for Photoshop and that will improve it. My Samsung 860 Pro 512 GB will probably be used as my main drive but will split it up in partitions for Data and Garbage Collection for TMP and TEMP files and other crap.

Sounds good?

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Can try it if you want, personally, I'd just leave it as is. I don't think you'll achieve significant gains from partitioning areas when they are physically on the same device.

 

[D0M1N13]

Can try it if you want, personally, I'd just leave it as is. I don't think you'll achieve significant gains from partitioning areas when they are physically on the same device.

So I overclocked my i7-3930K to 4.4 GHz. I did some stress testing and it's stable but temps are between 75 and 80C but then in a couple of minutes they come back down to 65C and then they go up but it looks good. My voltage is 1.44v at 4.4GHz. Anyways, I think I will maybe tweak some more to let my temps be at 65 around there.

I then tried out some intensive operations in Photoshop and Lightroom and all ran like butter - smoothly with no lag and very fast. Although, when I was doing those operations, I was also monitoring my CPU with CPU-Z and Photoshop and Lightroom was using more 4.2 GHz speeds and sometimes 4.4 GHz but not that much as 4.2GHz. I am not running my CPU 24/7 at 4.4GHz so whenever my CPU is on idle it is giving me around 1.2 GHz and 36C.

 

[andy_mk3]

I'd say you should be able to get your voltage way lower than that, like 1.35v should be more than enough for those clocks.

 

[Jamin280672]

Why not RAID0.....at the end of the day, its a free upgrade / speed increase regardless of ram bottlenecks etc, it will still give you a slight performance increase, people here will tell you about failure rates and loosing data etc, but ive always ran my systems in RAID0 and im talking 28 years, starting with mechanical drives, upto SSD's and now nvme's, im running RAID0 right now, and never had a failure, its only the odd's of loosing your data go up, not the failure rate, just get a 1tb mechanical drive, you can get them dead cheap now-a-days, throw that into the mix and backup your personal data to it, or even some cheap cloud storage like one drive or google drive to backup too.

You are more likely to loose data by overclocking than you are from RAID0, if your system decides to BSOD or straight crash because of heat or instability whilst data is still locked in the ram instead of written to a disk, then its bye bye data.

 

[Quartz]

In my case, is it worth it?

No. For primary storage RAID 0 is just not safe. I'm a retired IT professional and have seen a lot of failed drives. Indeed, if you're serious about your data then you should put your drives in a RAID 1 (mirror) set.

 

[Jamin280672]

RAID 1 when you only have 2 drives is a waste of a drive, in the I.T world they dont use RAID0 or RAID1, they will use either RAID5 or on bigger systems they will use RAID10 (RAID1+0), if you are that concerned about data loss or failure, then you can get a 3rd drive and RAID5 them, the failure rate is no bigger than someone's system hard drive failing now, like I said before, if you are sensible and make regular back-up's of important data, then you have nothing to worry about, this even applies to someone running a single system drive, they are still going to loose all their data if and when that drive fails if they haven't created back-up's of some sort, unlike mechanical hard drives, SSD's in any configuration once they fail, you have next to no chance of getting your data back, the only reason people consider RAID0 as a massive risk is because you are relying on 2 drives instead of one, if you've had you drives a while and they've never let you down, then the trust is already there.

 

[Quartz]

RAID 1 when you only have 2 drives is a waste of a drive, in the I.T world they dont use RAID0 or RAID1, they will use either RAID5 or on bigger systems they will use RAID10 (RAID1+0),

That was not my experience. In my time RAID 1 was widely used for boot drives and the like in servers, and data sets were run on RAID 6 or better. RAID 5 for storage was initially fine but came to have too many disadvantages, the most obvious being the long rebuild times with only one parity drive, during which time the data is in danger. It all depends upon how resilient your want your data storage to be.

 

[pugheaven]

I've been running RAID0 for years and swear by it and not had a failure (waits to finish sentence before PC dies a death hahaha). However, I have 2 RAID0 setups, the 2nd RAID0 setup I clone once per month so I know I have consistancy from the 1st setup. Therefore if RAID0 goes down, literally switch to other set... suppose what I'm doing here is basically RAID5 without the automation. I love the sheer speed and grunt with RAID0 and wouldn't have a system that wasn't RAID0 tbh. Well certainly not on SATA3 (6GB) anyway, M.2 is a different story and not sure it'll benefit too much, however may find out. However I understand others arne't interssting so it's horses for courses.

 

[Oh Ed not again.]

I run RAID0 for my Steam/Uplay etc. libraries, they're backed up once a month and they're easily downloadable again from the <1 month backup should the array fail.

Probably should change out for an NVMe, but at the time I had two 500GB Samsung 840s on hand so it was more for convenience than anything.

 

[Quartz]

An interesting setup I saw once was RAID 66. There were four drive backplanes, each with a dozen or more HDDs. Drives were RAIDed first vertically down the backplanes - so drive 1 on backplane 1 was in the same set on backplane 2 - then RAIDed again across the backplanes. This way the data was protected not only against single drive failure but also against a backplane failure. Data resilience was VERY important in that use case.

 

[Arcane]

I used RAID 0 when the biggest SSD you could get were OCZ 60gb, a mere £240 each.

 

[Ch3m1c4L]

I've been running RAID0 for years and swear by it and not had a failure (waits to finish sentence before PC dies a death hahaha). However, I have 2 RAID0 setups, the 2nd RAID0 setup I clone once per month so I know I have consistancy from the 1st setup. Therefore if RAID0 goes down, literally switch to other set... suppose what I'm doing here is basically RAID5 without the automation. I love the sheer speed and grunt with RAID0 and wouldn't have a system that wasn't RAID0 tbh. Well certainly not on SATA3 (6GB) anyway, M.2 is a different story and not sure it'll benefit too much, however may find out. However I understand others arne't interssting so it's horses for courses.

That's raid 10, or technically 01 I guess, you'd be best off actually doing that as raid 10 in one array. 4x read 2x write resilient to one array failing as per now.
Currently you are getting 2x r/w and are having a cold copy on raid 0 too.

As to op, for your usage, you'll get meh benefits. Go nvme if you want speed. Iops is king for most use cases.