To RAID or not to RAID...

19ninety

19ninety

19ninety

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OK, I'm kinda slowly updating my system.
As part of this once I get a new mobo I'm thinking or going all RAID on this baby.... however, is it really worth it? I mean honestly, no 'benchmark' figures etc. I'm talking everyday system, net, serious gamer, dvd watcher, large file downloader and photoshop user.
My reason for asking is partly due to Photoshop, as your supposed (from what I can tell) to not use the same physical drives (say with partitions on) as your PS install for creating scratch disk's (yes I use large image files as I'm into photography)
The drives I have are two Samsung HD160JJ and a Maxtor DM10 6L300S0 (current drive in use). In realistic terms, would it be just aswell to fresh install on one samsung and use that as the main, use the other as a D/L and active drive for ripping, editing, packing, and all general data work, then use the Maxtor as a storage drive.

Also the samsungs are spec'd as being 300mb/s (3Gbit) capable, would this only be achievable in RAID? or is the mobo I hopeing to get (Asus P5N32-E SLI) able to perform at a high speed?

Sorry for the long post with lots of questions :D
 
You will never get anywhere near 300Mb/s even with RAID 0, more likely 115-120Mb/s max. However I would suggest RAID 1, this way you get a backup of all your data and you will get an improved seek performace.

RAID 0 is all very well and you will have faster write performance but if your unlucky and one of your drives breaks your going to lose all of your data, and if your in to photography this would be annoying :)

Whereas with RAID 1 if a drive fails you can simple unplug it (whilst still working on your PC), and when you get around to buying a new one (same size drive preferably) you can just plug it in and the array sorts out the coping files across for you.

<edit> Your sig is to big by the way, it needs to be a maximum of 4 lines or 400x75 pixels
 
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Yea I havent liked the sound of RAID 0 since I saw lots of people saying what you said. How will the performance of RAID 1 be compaired to a single drive? Is it 'really' noticable? Or more of a l33test thing?
 
Cant find my other post on topic, but seems every week there is a "Raid0 or not to Raid0" topic.
Sure 2 drives means more chance of failure, so does 2 sticks of ram instead 1 or 2 CPU cores instead 1 or a motorcar with 4 tyres getting a puncture over a motorbike with 2 tyres, I have ran Raid0 for over 1 year with crashing/locking up PC due to overclocking and benching and never lost a HDD.
 
I kind of knew someone would say that or a car may be safer with 4 tyres etc, fact is risk is there but HDD's are better than ever and if you want the speed you take the 2x risk, the same with overclocking your CPU/RAM or GPU, its about all you can do to "OC" your HDD.
 
I use 2 X WD Raptors in raid0 and I like it. I can notice the difference easy and I am just a general user.
 
A number of years ago I built a machine around an Abit KG7-Raid motherboard.
This was my first attempt at Raid 0 and since then every computer that I have built has used Raid 0 if possible.
"Touch wood" I have never had one problem. Maybe the key is to always buy top quality components for your PC.

PeterT.
 
Ok, well, I think that about sums it up. RAID 0 it is, just one last question, can you ran partitions on raid drives?

They should change the HDD FAQ to have RAID in it too I reckon as I only just found it by browsing, got lots of raid info in there.

thanks guys.
 
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Yes, the Raid is done at a hardware level, once Windows see the HDD its 1 HDD as far as its concerned, you can treat it same as any other single HDD, partition it for dual boot etc. :)
 
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