Source: Tom's Hardware UK – Keywords: parallel, processing, RAM
Categories: Hardware
HDD Parallelism: Single, Dual Or Quad Hard Drives

Hard drive parallelism sounds awkward, but it has been possible to combine the performance of multiple hard drives for years. The key to it is Redundant Array of Independent Drives (RAID) technology, which allows a RAID controller to distribute data across multiple hard drive, combining the throughput of the individual drives. While add-on RAID controllers have been popular on enthusiast motherboards since the times of the Athlon XP or Pentium 4 on Socket 478, chipset makers soon added basic RAID capabilities to their core logic products.
The option to combine two hard drives in a RAID 0 stripeset or mirrored in a RAID 1 array has been around for years. Current chipsets with four or six Serial ATA ports are capable of spanning arrays across all ports. We decided to put up a conventional setup with a single hard drive against two RAID 0 configurations: one with two hard drives and the other with four drives. We selected four WD1500 Raptor hard drives for these tests.

Most enthusiast motherboards offer at least six Serial ATA ports.


- Previous page Dual Channel To The Rescue
- Next page Test Setup
You seem to have missed the point as to the practical advantages of a enthusiast raid 0 rig. some common situations are really helped out by better storage performance.
Most built in raid seem to be stuck at max bandwith of 133 (basicly UDMA 133 IDE speeds spec and thats Total for all 6 ports combined in some caes) so when you add 1-2 more disk speed does not increase much or at all
Visa a vie raid-0 on HD. Try chucking big data about - that won't be cached in RAM... I do this a lot and bless striping everytime (linear access flies)! Sharing over a network (especially gigabit) benefits as well of course...
Does the author actually understand how computers work? Using CPU bound applications to demonstrate that raiding drives is a waste of time... !! What have the THG authors been smoking these days?? Do you guys have any formal qualifications in Computer Science or anything??
Pointless article...
Now how about an article about the guy who has hit 6Ghz recently with the new 45nm Intel chips...
Or an article about striping 8 266x CF cards with SATA-CF(ide) converters and booting Windows of it?? That would be interesting...
What happened to THG of old with the videos of liquid nitrogen experiments...
A big yawn to the author...
Bob
Where are all the EXCITING/INTERESTING articles nowadays? I can't remember the last time I saw a NEW video that was worth watching all the way through.
3dGameman is doing a cracking job of doing some h/w reviews. Nothing destructive, but worth checking out. Tom's seem to have gone on a green crusade of late, and while the solar panel pc is an interesting testbed, and pioneering, the majority of us would not build such a thing.
Enthusiast is a strong word, but I really thing that Tom's have gone completely mainstream, and with the diversification of the page layouts across the world wide sites, I'm finding myslef spending much more time in the madshrimps, hexus and ntcompatible sites as they still have something new to offer.
The next evolution in PC performance, imo, is the solid state drive. A week or so ago you wet our whiskers with an article that touched on the concept and basics. How about a more comprehensive breakout detailing the parts.
And please stop this childish blockade against raptor drives. They may well have some ideosynchracies, but there are so many of us out here that recognise them for what they are, surely you would be better off if you were to still include them and show the problem. If anything is going to get WD to fix the problem it'll be someone showing problems, rather than a site ignoring their product. New readers to your site, or people who missed your article wont have a clue as to why you dont use it, unless they actually look for the problem.
Just my pennies worth....
I think u guys need to recruit new talents with new ideas.
We all know u cant come up with good things forever.
Stop trying to be irrational.
As i noticed recently ur just making articles for the sake of making them. And seriously noone cares about articles showing nothing changes.
But everyone wants to see articles that show a difference.
I am an old fan of THG and i dont want to see u guys go down like this.
Best of Luck.