4drives in raid0

powned · 21 Feb 2006 at 11:50

lo,

im after about 400 - 500 gig+ storage for my new rig. Just wondering would 4x smaller sata2 drives drives be the best choice for quickness or would the performance increase over 2 larger drives be worth it (would there even be a performance increase)? I will be using the drives for gaming/moving large files/image editing.
I know that drives very in performance so im just talking theoreticaly here.

thanx

Smurfy · 21 Feb 2006 at 12:12

powned said:
lo,

im after about 400 - 500 gig+ storage for my new rig. Just wondering would 4x smaller sata2 drives drives be the best choice for quickness or would the performance increase over 2 larger drives be worth it (would there even be a performance increase)? I will be using the drives for gaming/moving large files/image editing.
I know that drives very in performance so im just talking theoreticaly here.

thanx

For the love of god dont use Raid 0 for storage, keep to single drives or consider Raid 0+1 or something similar. Raid 0 is not something to be used for large storage, in increases your chance of data loss/corruption by howevery many drives your using in your case x4 when compared with a single drive.

powned · 21 Feb 2006 at 13:38

aye, didnt think on about it being 4x more chance for data loss.. good point that.

but i am not just using the drives for storage, speed is more important than storage to me.. (eg map loading times in fps games and converting avi files unzipping large files) most of my storage will be backed up to dvd at some point anyway.. i just get lazy with backing up and like to let the data build up before i backup. The majority of my permanat storage will be mp3s and jpegs (which isnt agreat ammount at the moment).

anyone know if there are peformance gains to be had from 4 drives rather than 2, or is it just to risky?

tomos · 21 Feb 2006 at 17:12

there would be performance gains, but it would also be risky mate

powned · 21 Feb 2006 at 17:47

thanks m8, think ill go for 2 drives, rather than 4.. would love a couple of raptors but i couldnt spend that much on hdds

tomos · 21 Feb 2006 at 18:04

i have a raid-0 with just 2x120 gig WD drives for 2 years now. only prob i've had with them is when the mobo died at some point so couldnt boot properly. new mobo on RMA a year ago and all fine. (touch wood!)

powned · 21 Feb 2006 at 22:27

now that youve said it somethins bound to happen lol.. the only prob i have now is reading loads of benchies to find good drives.. unless anyone here has any recommendations?

where bouts in lpool you from tomos? am from Garston

binaryknight · 21 Feb 2006 at 22:33

if you are raiding 4 dives its best to have each drive as master on its own channel to enable max performance got 4 dedicated master channels spare?

powned · 21 Feb 2006 at 22:39

not at the mo but i will have when i build this new pc.. thats somethin to keep in mind tho

tomos · 22 Feb 2006 at 12:26

powned said:
now that youve said it somethins bound to happen lol.. the only prob i have now is reading loads of benchies to find good drives.. unless anyone here has any recommendations?

where bouts in lpool you from tomos? am from Garston

plan to try and raid my raptors at some point, failing that i've heard the hitachi's are decent now.

as for me, i'm in the city centre, but i'm not a native mate

ubern00b · 22 Feb 2006 at 17:08

I should do a HDTach screenshot sometime. Running 4 x Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB SATAII drives in RAID0. HDTach reports 340mb/s burst, 160mb/s average and the graph is a straight line on the 160mb/s mark. Brilliant drives and blindingly fast.

binaryknight · 23 Feb 2006 at 02:19

ubern00b said:
I should do a HDTach screenshot sometime. Running 4 x Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB SATAII drives in RAID0. HDTach reports 340mb/s burst, 160mb/s average and the graph is a straight line on the 160mb/s mark. Brilliant drives and blindingly fast.

willy waving tbh

ubern00b · 23 Feb 2006 at 09:24

binaryknight said:
willy waving tbh

Is this not what the thread is asking? TBH only reason I RAIDed the drives was because I wanted the space to be 1 large drive and not 4 individual drives, and all other solutions I found were redundantless so I figured im not losing anything by RAIDing them. Non critical data on there of course.

smids · 23 Feb 2006 at 09:57

ubern00b said:
I should do a HDTach screenshot sometime. Running 4 x Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB SATAII drives in RAID0. HDTach reports 340mb/s burst, 160mb/s average and the graph is a straight line on the 160mb/s mark. Brilliant drives and blindingly fast.

Not as fast as I thought it would be - what controller, stripe size and all drives set to SATA-II mode from the feature tool?

ubern00b · 23 Feb 2006 at 14:35

Nforce4 (A8N32-SLi)
Stripe Size 64k (testing showed this to be slightly faster with a smoother graph line)
All drives set to SATAII with the feature tool.

smids · 23 Feb 2006 at 15:02

What is your main usage for the drives? I have a 32K stripe and before that a 16KB.

16K is for exceptionally fast windows and very high read (you would probably get about 190MB/s with a 16K stripe).

32K is a happy medium between gaming and windows. Probably about 175-180MB/s read.

64K + is pure gaming. All files which are smaller than the stripe size (loads of windows files) are not made into a RAID0 and are only put on one drive. The larger stripes also give much lower benchmarks but very good game map loading performance. I went against this because RAID0 with two drives is fast enough for game maps let alone 4 drives. But now you have a slow windows performance. For this reason I would suggest dropping to 32/16K stripe unless games are all that matter.

My 4 x Hitachi 80GB drives in RAID0+1 (2 striped arrays mirrored with each other) score 97MB/s average read, 400MB/s burst, 12.8ms access time.

binaryknight · 23 Feb 2006 at 15:55

ubern00b said:
Is this not what the thread is asking? TBH only reason I RAIDed the drives was because I wanted the space to be 1 large drive and not 4 individual drives, and all other solutions I found were redundantless so I figured im not losing anything by RAIDing them. Non critical data on there of course.

see the sticky out tounge........ as in a post in jest....... a joke........... believe it or not i have raided drives too not on the same scale or performance level as you tho

ubern00b · 23 Feb 2006 at 19:21

binaryknight said:
see the sticky out tounge........ as in a post in jest....... a joke........... believe it or not i have raided drives too not on the same scale or performance level as you tho

My appologies good sir

binaryknight · 23 Feb 2006 at 19:47

ubern00b said:
My appologies good sir

now you are taking the wee by calling me a good sir lol

ubern00b · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:14

smids said:
What is your main usage for the drives? I have a 32K stripe and before that a 16KB.

16K is for exceptionally fast windows and very high read (you would probably get about 190MB/s with a 16K stripe).

32K is a happy medium between gaming and windows. Probably about 175-180MB/s read.

64K + is pure gaming. All files which are smaller than the stripe size (loads of windows files) are not made into a RAID0 and are only put on one drive. The larger stripes also give much lower benchmarks but very good game map loading performance. I went against this because RAID0 with two drives is fast enough for game maps let alone 4 drives. But now you have a slow windows performance. For this reason I would suggest dropping to 32/16K stripe unless games are all that matter.

My 4 x Hitachi 80GB drives in RAID0+1 (2 striped arrays mirrored with each other) score 97MB/s average read, 400MB/s burst, 12.8ms access time.

The drive holds purely large files of 700mb each (movies etc) and DVDR images and the odd ISO. I was told to go with a 64/120k stripe for this sort of data storage. I have a 74gb raptor for boot/games that does the job quite well.

binaryknight: I cant seem to do anything right in this thread