Pre-RAID Guide

[vernong1992]

ppl here are often confused about it, so i think a guide may be useful.... we'll do this thing like we did for the techies bible, for those who weren't here when we wrote taht, first we did a pretopic for a "rough-draft" and then, I'll do the real thing later, so i don't have to go thru the hassle of editing later:

RAID0- Uses a min of two disks (can be used with two different sized HD's, resulting in the array's size being doubled of the smallest sized drives (or multiplied how many drives u use) Example, use a 250gb and a 160gb HD for a RAID array, and the arrays size will be 320GB or (160 x 2) This uses increased performance which is useful for a gaming and a cheap alternative for Raptor X or Cheetah in CAD builds, however faults are possible as if one hard drive fails, the data from both drives are gone (also called striping)


RAID1- Uses a minimum of 2Hard Drives, used to provide extra data security, used when ur data is crucial and really important (insert situation here) however, u get the capacity of 1 of the HD if u look in My Computer, the other disk will not be seeing and acting as a “mirror” of the first HD, however a person must remember RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A BACKUP!!! If you get infected with a virus remember the other drive will clone it too!

RAID5- Uses a minimum of 3 Hard Drives, and gives some performance (not as much as RAID0+1 or RAID0, but still performance boost, also cheap alternative to Raptor X’s or Cheetah SCSI Drives, while also doing a security, if one hard drive fails the array build itself after u replace the failed drive

right now i put the 3 basic levels (if ppl want me to go thru the others like the complex ones, like RAID0+1 or RAID1+0 etc etc, i will go thru those as well)

[Bot2011]

Nice start.

I agree RAID 1 is not a substitute for a backup but because it mirrors the main drive it's more forgiving for those situations where you do not backup as regularly as you should.

All the RAID arrays produce a small increase in performance but the biggest misconseption is that you absolutely need RAID 0 if you game. This is not the case. The performance increase when gaming is minimal and very dependant on whether the gaming data is being read from the memory or the hd. Some games actually read data from the hd most will read data from what is loaded into the memory. No RAID array will improve your gaming performance when you play MMOs as that is dependant on your isp and bandwidth as well as the MMOs servers.

By doing either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 you will get twice the storage for the same if not less cost as a single 10,000 or 15,000 RPM drive.

A short description of RAID 0+1 provided to me by Capricorn:

Originally Posted by Capricorn

Now one could ask the question, is there any way to get the saftey of RAID 1 with the speed of RAID 0? Almost, and it's called RAID 0+1. In RAID 0+1, the drives are both mirrored and striped. Most motherboards with RAID now support it. The downside is it takes four drives. Two drives mirror the other two (the RAID 1 part of 0+1) and the two drives being mirrored are using stiping (RAID 0). You get the speed of RAID 0 in that both sets of striped drives are being written to in parallel as before. You get the security of RAID 1 in that the primary RAID 0 drives are being mirrored with duplicate writes to the mirrored drives. Because there is synchronization involved in the mirroring, RAID 0+1 isn't quite as fast as RAID 0, but it's pretty close. If you're going to go with RAID 0+1, you probably want a motherboard with at least six SATA ports. The drives alone will take four. Any SATA DVD-ROM/RW, CD-ROM/RW will require more ports.

Another blurp from Capricorn which I agree with 100% about why I am going with RAID 1:

Originally Posted by Capricorn

Why don't I use RAID 0+1 instead of just RAID 1? For one thing, it does still cost more. Also, one thing not mentioned before is RAID 1 (for most recent chipsets at least) acts like RAID 0 when reading. That is, when reading data, a RAID 1 system can be read using parallel reads of every other block from both drives just like RAID 0. When writing, it has to fall back to its slower-than-a-single-disk mode. The thing is that in decently configured gaming machines, reads outnumber writes significantly. I do get much of the RAID 0 (and 0+1) advantage without the cost outlay. If this was a database server, where the number of writes to disk would increase signficantly (but still be fewer than the reads), RAID 0+1 makes more sense. RAID 0 (and 0+1) do still have an advantage when it come to the virtual memory swap area. When swapping memory to disk, RAID 0 has a big advantage over RAID 1. The swapping memory to disk could potentially happen often in a typical machine. However, again, we're talking a gaming machine. Gaming machines are a minimum of 2GB now. With Vista, I'd go for 4GB. We put that much RAM in there to reduce the amount of (re-)reads and swapping virtual memory to disk. With enough RAM, memory swapping to disk practically eliminated.

[AP4LIFETN]

many high intensive games where map files are huge, it does load faster...try playing bf on a single hard drive setup, and then a raid 0 setup, it is much faster

[Bot2011]

Yes it does have an increased performance. I am not saying there is not increase in performance. But it's not absolutely needed and the performance increase is minimal which is dependant on whether the data is loaded from memory or the hd. If it's from memory the performance increase is minimal, but its a bit more if the data is loaded from the hd.

[AP4LIFETN]

nothing is absolutely needed except shelter and food...everything else is wanted..and if someone wants the minimal performance, they can get the minimal performance

[fade2black2004]

i think RAID 0 is usless ive tried it and the performance increase isnt noticible for the most part and if one HDD fails there goes all your data

nice to see we finally have a RAID guide im tired of noobs coming in hear asking what RAID is when they can google it in two seconds

[Bot2011]

I am starting to read more about this as a possibility. Could be interesting it uses 2 hd's in both the RAID 0 (os and aps) AND RAID 1.

Intel Matrix Storage

[nagasama]

yeah in my opinion RAID 0 is useless as well. if you are going to do RAID, the only way to do it is backup style. why have a performance increase over 1 hdd if it will just fail, like having 1 hdd. thats just senseless.

[Gabb]

Well for CPU gaming machines I dont think data being lost is that much of big deal ( compared to if I use the CPU for work or business ), anyways good post but you missed a few things:

-What is required to RAID 0

-Can RAID be done on OEM hard drives like the famous seagate 7200.10, do they have any additional wires I need?

-The differance between software/hardware RAIDing

[AP4LIFETN]

Originally Posted by Gabb

Well for CPU gaming machines I dont think data being lost is that much of big deal ( compared to if I use the CPU for work or business ), anyways good post but you missed a few things:

-What is required to RAID 0

-Can RAID be done on OEM hard drives like the famous seagate 7200.10, do they have any additional wires I need?

-The differance between software/hardware RAIDing

-you need at 2 drives for raid 0
-its hooked up like regular drives..so yes..a power and a sata cable
-im pretty sure hardware raid is faster...software raid uses the program inside xp to do so