RAID again...

RuggieBear

I've been reading up as much as i can on RAID and to be frank i'm still at a bit of a loss!

i want to get a second Western Digital Caviar 120GB IDE ATA/100 8MB cache 7200RPM which costs €86 in komplett . Now i think my motherboard (Asus A7N8X Deluxe V2.0) has an onboard RAID controller (but i'm not sure if it is only for SATA).

Would it be possible to RAID these drives? Is it worth it? Or do I need to get a RAID controller as well?

Thanks

P

EDIT: Actually i've just readthis article and now i'm unsure whether to bother!

Dingatron

The Asus A7N8X Deluxe V2.0 only supports raid on the SATA drives. You could get PATA to SATA connectors but I haven't heard anything good about them to be honest. Also they were very dear at the time but I was looking for some a good few months ago. Or you could get an IDE raid controller.Nice board have it myself.

RuggieBear

Thanks ding...had a feeling it was only for SATA. So wat would be a good IDE raid controller? Just had a look a komplett and there are preices from €35 to €500...really only have a budget of €120 as i want to get a dvd burner as well!!

CivilServant

Not really worth doing RAID unless you plan on doing some disk intensive work. Eg. photoshop scratchbook, video editing, anything that involves moving huge files on a regular basis. Game loads might be a second or two faster, but that's about the most real world advantage you'll see.

RuggieBear

Originally posted by CivilServant
Not really worth doing RAID unless you plan on doing some disk intensive work. Eg. photoshop scratchbook, video editing, anything that involves moving huge files on a regular basis. Game loads might be a second or two faster, but that's about the most real world advantage you'll see.

I was begining to think that. Use mine mainly for GIS and games. So probably not worth it at the moment.

Cheers
P

Dingatron

Yeah their very good for video editing and stuff like that. Ut2004 and Far Cry load a little faster Also boot times! I have my 2 X WD Raptors Raid 0 boot in 1/2 an XP bar.

CivilServant

74Gig raptors? Load times are dependent on cpu. So my guess is... a64?

Dingatron

You think I'm made of money! Nah 2 X 36Gig and a XP2400 @ 10.5 x 207=2173. The 74Gig ones are nice but their around 240 a pop. Thought load times were a combination of the cpu+disk performance though I am by no means an expert on this. A64 is the way I'm going though. Built one last night and have to say I'm well impressed. And that was a entry level Athlon 64 3000+ 2.0 GHz.

leeroybrown

I'm presuming you're thinking of a RAID0.

As mentioned above you only make a significant gain if you are doing a lot of disk intensive work.

Once you've eliminated a strict necessity for the speed increase then all you're doing is introducing extra layers of failure. If an onboard RAID controller (which are crap from a recovery point of view) fails your data is gone. If one disk fails, the data on both drives is gone. It's also possible for arrays to get messed up without hardware failure.

RuggieBear

Originally posted by leeroybrown
I'm presuming you're thinking of a RAID0.

As mentioned above you only make a significant gain if you are doing a lot of disk intensive work.

Once you've eliminated a strict necessity for the speed increase then all you're doing is introducing extra layers of failure. If an onboard RAID controller (which are crap from a recovery point of view) fails your data is gone. If one disk fails, the data on both drives is gone. It's also possible for arrays to get messed up without hardware failure.

Well, i see it's not really worth it for me so. Grand!!! Saved myself some money and effort:D

Next Question, any recommendations for a dvd burner? Dataisgod has a thread up there soemwhere about it. Think i'll get pretty much what he decides on. NO PRESSURE Data!!!!:D

Azza

Just noticed the western digital raptors have dropped in price yet again. The 74gig raptor is now just under €200.

Zakalwe

Anandtech recently did some test on RAID 0 performance as provided by several modern motherboards.

Their findings? RAID 0 might give you a 10% inrease in speed at the cost of doubling your chance of losing your data.

RuggieBear

Originally posted by Zakalwe
Anandtech recently did some test on RAID 0 performance as provided by several modern motherboards.

Their findings? RAID 0 might give you a 10% inrease in speed at the cost of doubling your chance of losing your data.

Is that the same article i linked to in my original post? That and all the advice here have swayed me from the possible perils of RAID0

p

Azza

I have had about 7 hard drives over the years and none of them have failed. I believe the risk is overstated but the performance gain is not significant when running on raid.

Dingatron

Tis true. I lost my raid setup two weeks ago. Fortunately I have learned from previous mistakes and ghost it once every two weeks so didn't lose too much.

leeroybrown

I have had about 7 hard drives over the years and none of them have failed.

You're doing well. I've had five failed drives. Two I owned myself and three in servers in admin (all three in the last two weeks).

Slutmonkey57b

Storage Review is your friend. Lots of highly technical jargon, bottom line:

Raid is useless for single - user environments.