Games drive Raid 1 or 0

Ch3m1c4L

Ch3m1c4L

Ch3m1c4L

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Using some cheapo sata 2 port card that happens to support RAID and I already have it(bought to add in more sata ports ages ago), with an F1 and an F3 1TiB drives, 100% for games, nothing else touching the array, as such write performance isnt that important.

RAID 0 obv best performance, but id have to bother to get a 2TiB external to back up to, which is a bit undesirable since its effort and costly, and i jsut spent £230 on a ssd, F3, and caddies for both today.

RAID 1 redundancy, prefer this, but would i get any actualy benefit to read speeds being as its going to be my cpu doing any calcs still?

Only care about game loading times. Im running win 7 with the righ in my sig below. When I do this I will be putting Win7 on a new OCZ vertex 60GB SSD (the promo one), ditchy a dvd drive and adding the F3 to the system.

So, if i were to pull numbers out of my ass and make a complete guess, am i far wrong?

Single disk = 100% read/write performance
Raid 0 = like 160% read/write (due to cheapo controller, random guess at number)
RAID 1 = 130% read (more in certain situations?) and 30/40% write?
 
As far as i know, Raid 1 doesn't give any performance boost hence it's mirroring the hdd. I prefer Raid 0 because it offers better performance overall.
 
I don't think there is any noticeable performance loss in writing to a raid 1 array, as the card handles the calculations for the most part. You can get a read performance boost, but it wouldn't really make much difference. I did have a raid 1 array for a while, and it was just like having one hard drive. I switched to raid 0 and use backups now. I think i get about a 40-70% increase on read/write speeds.

You should be making backups with raid 1 anyway, it really isn't meant to be used as a backup. If you used 2 1TB drives to make a raid 0 array, you would only need a 1TB drive as a backup, and they aren't too expensive, especially compared to losing your data.
 
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the data, being purely installed games doesnt mean that much to me, other than time, and over haf are on steam so its not even like i have to sit there installing them lol.

Why would I only need a 1tb drive to backup a raid 0 array made up of 2 1tb disks? It spans it, thus giving me 2tb of raid 0 goodness....but i cant see myself using more than 1tb for a while, with every game i have ever owned installed its still only 600gb lol.

I have very little on my pc that is actually important, and i can back it up onto any of my other machines if it is important, and if its critical then i can ftp it to a couple of off site locations :), so i only really care about redundancy, to avoid down time.

So, you noticed no real difference with raid 1, but ahve with raid 0...good to know, ill wait on some more peoples opinions before i decide though.
 
lord,you wrong. It strips data across drives, you dont lose any space with raid 0, thats kinda the point - maximum space and performace at the cost of redundancy.

Google it, or wiki it....
 
Right,

Raid 0 (Striping) Is where the data is striped across 2 disks. Just for example purposes this would be like splitting a file in half putting one on Drive1 and one on Drive2. This gives a faster read write I/O because both drives can seek at once.

Raid 1 (Mirror) Is a direct copy of Drive1 to Drive2. So there is no performance gain.

Raid 0 = Fast I/O and write/read. But if one disk is lost. All data on both drives is lost.
Raid 1 = No performance gain, Can only use 1 drive worth of space. But if one Drive is lost. Data is safe.
Single drive = No performance gain, No Backup ability.

So personally if your just playing games and have no important info to store. Use raid 0 for speed.
 
Sorry just read first post properly.

Feel free to correct me, But I don't think raid 1 has any speed benefit over single drive?
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
lord,you wrong. It strips data across drives, you dont lose any space with raid 0, thats kinda the point - maximum space and performace at the cost of redundancy.

Google it, or wiki it....
Click to expand...

Ah sorry,, so it does. If the data isn't important, go raid 0. You won't regret it. i suppose you could get a small drive and backup the important stuff anyway.
 
Remembered Ive already got a external 750gb, so can put it all in RAID 0 and use that as a direct copy for now. If it turns out the controller has issues with not degrading or something then i can always restore and use it as raid 1 or single drives :)

Thanks for the help guys.

@ hairy, i know the differences, i researched a lot into stuff when i went with my raid 5 setup for my media, but wanted some real world opinions of if it made an actual difference while :).

I know my 4 F1's get a nice 267mb/s read using the onboard controller, which isnt as high as it could be, but its a damn site better than 1 drive, especially when lots of people are accessing it.
 
Duke said:
Nope.

OP: All you need to know is here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID - but Hairy has it right anyway in his post.
Click to expand...

so, what does the below mean in my situation? I'll go raid 0 me thinks, and just keep a back up, see how it goes. once i run out of backup space on my externals/ raid 5 array then ill see if i can afford a bigger external then :)....

"Increased read performance occurs when using a multi-threaded operating system that supports split seeks"


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-threaded

"N:M (Hybrid threading)

N:M maps some N number of application threads onto some M number of kernel entities, or "virtual processors". This is a compromise between kernel-level ("1:1") and user-level ("N:1") threading. In general, "N:M" threading systems are more complex to implement than either kernel or user threads, because both changes to kernel and user-space code are required. In the N:M implementation, the threading library is responsible for scheduling user threads on the available schedulable entities; this makes context switching of threads very fast, as it avoids system calls. However, this increases complexity and the likelihood of priority inversion, as well as suboptimal scheduling without extensive (and expensive) coordination between the userland scheduler and the kernel scheduler."


"Hybrid implementation examples
* Microsoft Windows 7"
 
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