Raid Arrays - How easy to setup?

Blaen

Blaen

Blaen

Associate
Joined
12 Apr 2008
Posts
9
I've built large numbers of PC's but until now never had the chance to include a raid array.

The plan is to include 2 x Western Digital WD2500AAKS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB in a raid to boost performance.

Now I'm assuming this will require using Raid 1 so the disks are mirrored for improved performance from split seeking. Or would it be better to go for Raid 0 for maximum performance, or does Raid 1 actually give better read performance (most important as far as I'm concerned).

Am I right in thinking that to setup the array you just turn Raid 1 on via the BIOS and then go about installing the OS as normal, or is there more to it?

Any feedback and advice would be gratefully received.
 
Last edited:
im also quite interested in how easy it to to set up. I do know that raid 0 is much quicker than raid1, which isnt much faster than a single disk AFAIK
 
it's easy peasy, as long as your mobo supports raid :)

Raid1 will not give you higher throughput in most situations.. in fact, your latency will be slightly higher. Depending on the controller, Raid1 reads can be quicker when reading multiple files at once than from a single drive, but I don't have enough experience with raid1 to say whether ICH9R does this:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perfReadWrite.html

Raid0 is the way to go, but I'm all for performance, and I can guarantee that within two posts someone slams me for not recommending any parity ;)

For an idea of real world performance - I get sustained reads from my raid0 setup of ~185MB/s.. you're not going to get that on any single drive out there :)
 
Last edited:
qwerty321 said:
What read and write speeds should i expect from a pair of 320 or 640gb samsung f1s in raid 0?
Click to expand...

should be fairly similar to mine (2x1TB F1s)..

not too sure on my write speed, as it maxes out the read speed of my other drives before maxing its write speed, but It's definately more than 140MB/s..

read should be ~180MB/s..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom