Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

For anybody considering setting up a RAID 0 stripe on their computers
for more performance, I thought that I would share my experiences with
you before you make the plunge.

I have a Dimension 8400 with an onboard RAID controller on the
motherboard. I got a hold of a free 160GB Maxtor SATA drive which is
the same size as my Seagate 160GB SATA drive that my 8400 came with. I
did some testing of real world performance between a single drive and
the 2 drives together in a RAID 0 configuration.

Overall, for general purpose stuff...booting, playing Battlefield 2,
running Office applications and such.....using the RAID 0 configuation
provides no improvement in performance. All tests were within 1 second
of each other and sometimes the RAID config was even slower. Of course,
the benchmarks apps showed a huge performane increase ( I went from
52MB/s to 94MB/s), but actual performance for me was unnoticeable.

Where I did see a huge increase in performance was reading and writing
very large files from one folder on the drive to another folder on the
drive. It would also make a large difference if you were heavy into
graphic editing, movie editing or high end photoshop stuff.

Overall, I went back to a single drive. The risks with RAID 0 (if you
lose 1 drive, you lose all of the data) isn't worth the miniscule
performance increase (or decrease in some cases) for what I typically do
with my computers. I occassionally copy large files around, but not
enough to risk the loss of data in the event of a drive failure.

So there you have it, from a real world computer user who througly
tested and timed. Even if you are a hardcore gamer, your bottlenecks
are not with the disk drive and stipeing your hard drive for performance
reasons is getting you no advantage.

I'm sure somebody will strongly disagree with me, but like I said...for
the types of things that I do with my system, RAID0 provided no
benefits. Now, I do use RAID 1 (mirror) for my file server where data
redundancy is the number 1 thing.......so don't get he wrong idea, I
appreicate the benefits of RAID. There just wasn't any benefit of me
running RAID0. My performance in battlefield 2 did NOT change.

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

Thanks, that's a good assessment (and not too surprising) from first
hand experience. Personally, I wouldn't bother with RAID on a desktop,
perhaps a workstation, and definitely on servers. I prefer RAID 5 for
workstation use and 6, 10, or 0+1 if you happen to have tons of space.
At work we have a Sun 6320 with an expansion cab (currently it has
something ike 30TB) and we use RAID 5 for each tray. We have only once
had a major failure (two drives in the same tray failed simultaneously).
Hopefully, we should be picking up a 9990 by the end of the year which
will probably fill with 146GB SCSI's (fully configured that's 165TB raw
capacity). If we go that route, I'd expect we'd use RAID 6.

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

NuTCrAcKeR wrote:

> Sounds like an IBM ServeRaid controller ... they have 5, 5E, and 5EE.
>
> not aware of any consumer grade IDE or SATA controllers that do those.
>
> - NuTs

I imagine it's possible for consumers in software RAID (I know in
adition to the hardware RAID 5 we also used a software RAID across trays
with Veritas). Either way in my opinion, RAID 6 (& 10 & 0+1) is
overkill for consumers; I'd stick with 5 for workstation use (and SCSI
if I have the choice).

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

"Nicholas Andrade" <SDNick484@nospam.yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:j%wTe.2319$I7.5@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net...
> NuTCrAcKeR wrote:
>
>> Sounds like an IBM ServeRaid controller ... they have 5, 5E, and 5EE.
>>
>> not aware of any consumer grade IDE or SATA controllers that do those.
>>
>> - NuTs
>
> I imagine it's possible for consumers in software RAID (I know in adition
> to the hardware RAID 5 we also used a software RAID across trays with
> Veritas). Either way in my opinion, RAID 6 (& 10 & 0+1) is overkill for
> consumers; I'd stick with 5 for workstation use (and SCSI if I have the
> choice).

True, but i wouldnt consider Veritas Volume Manager, or Stroage Foundation a
"consumer grade" product. Its hardcore.