Raid 0 - Is it worth it?

D0M1N13 · 14 Apr 2020 at 17:28

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.

D0M1N13 · 14 Apr 2020 at 21:39

Tetras said:
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?

D0M1N13 · 15 Apr 2020 at 07:04

Meddling-Monk said:
@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

D0M1N13 · 15 Apr 2020 at 14:22

Donnie Fisher said:
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?

D0M1N13 · 17 Apr 2020 at 08:45

Donnie Fisher said:
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.