Raid Question

Phil2008 · 2 Feb 2006 at 16:53

At the moment I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 NCQ 200GB drive. With a 20gb partition for windows and apps, and another partition for the rest of the drive that has games,music ect on

shoud I get another Seagate drive and raid it, and have 2 partitions on in like Ive got at the moment.?
or
Should I get 2 36gb raptor drives and raid them, and only have my windows and apps on the drives, and have my current 200gb Seagate drive for my games and stuff?

Whitch option would you recommend for the most speed increase?

Whats raid 0, raid 1 ect? Ive never raided 2 drive before so I havent go a clue about raid. I just know you can have 2 same dives and link them together somehow to make the disk access faster. And my motherboard has raid so might aswel put it to good use.

semi-pro waster · 2 Feb 2006 at 18:00

Raid0 is striping whereby you pair two physical drives to appear as one logical drive in Windows, the data is split across both drives and depending on the use may be considerably faster(mainly working with very large files) because you have an improved read/write speed. However you have to rely on both hard drives continuing to work as if one fails then you lose all your data.

Raid1 is mirroring which as the name suggests provides you with an exact copy of one hard drive, it apparantly has some benefit in reads due to having two drives that the computer can read from but writes are either the same as a normal drive or slower. It is more secure and quite a good idea if you don't remember to take regular backups.

I'd probably go with 1x74gb Raptor over 2x36gb. You get marginally more space, it will cost less, be less hassle generally and not much slower(if at all). If you wish to experiment with Raid then that is fair enough but I'd suggest you read up on it a bit first, my brief summary may give you an idea though

Phil2008 · 2 Feb 2006 at 18:33

how fast would 2 seagate drives be??

semi-pro waster · 3 Feb 2006 at 11:00

speedy2004 said:
how fast would 2 seagate drives be??

Unfortunately I can't give you an exact or even an approximate figure. It will depend on the drives themselves, what you are trying to do with them and how good your Raid controller is amongst other things. Remember you will have to reformat your existing hard drive because for Raid0 both drives need to be 'built' together.

For myself when I had 2x200gb Maxtors in Raid0 it was faster for sustained writes and burst speed was also a little higher under HDTach, maybe 10-15mb and 10mb respectively but for my ordinary usage I have not noticed any difference now the Raid array is broken up.

Phil2008 · 3 Feb 2006 at 17:17

raid0 will also increased the the space to 400gb aswel... So you get cool performance and double the space???

semi-pro waster · 3 Feb 2006 at 17:27

If you want to look at it like that but you are really just keeping the same amount of space as you would have with two separate drives, maybe gaining a couple of mb with Raid0 as you only need one file system rather than two but it will be minimal.

The performance is better in some uses as I have said above but you may not notice the benefit in every day usage and there is an added risk of data loss.

However you seem to be keen on it so I'm not about to try and stop you, the reason I first went for a Raid system was curiousity.

Phil2008 · 3 Feb 2006 at 18:01

I might forget about raiding drives, cos as soon as I think i know what I am takling about, someone says thats wrong and im back at square A again...

I thought with raid 0 was spliting the data up between drives.. so say you have 1 file, that file will get split up between the 2 drives, causing more speed and doubling the space... but that theory of mine is wrong right????

semi-pro waster · 4 Feb 2006 at 11:27

speedy2004 said:
I thought with raid 0 was spliting the data up between drives.. so say you have 1 file, that file will get split up between the 2 drives, causing more speed and doubling the space... but that theory of mine is wrong right????

Correct Raid0 is splitting the data between the drives(AKA striping), the stripe size can be important here, if you have say a 32k stripe size but the file is only 29k then it will only be stored on one drive and obviously not striped across both as it isn't large enough.

You aren't doubling the space over having 2 independant drives, you are simply making sure you can access all available space unlike in Raid1(mirroring) whereby you only effectively get the space of one drive because the other drive is making an exact copy of it.