Secret47

Yep... I bought a couple 160 gb serial ata hard drives today. For the sole purpose of setting up a RAID array. Specifically a RAID 1 array. Why not RAID 0 you say? Well, RAID 0 is nice if you want spanning with some extra performance, but it's not going to be consistent performance since the data is essentially split between the hard drives. Also, if you loose a hard drive, you loose everything, there's no redundancy. With RAID 1 both hard drives have identical copies of your data. With this setup you will always have essentially twice the performance on reads, as the interface will split the read tasks evenly between the two drives (think of it as SLI for your hard drives). The downside is that write performance will be the same as a single hard drive (as both drives have to have identical data). But, since reading is what your hard drive spends the majority of its time doing, the performance gains will seem better than with a RAID 0 setup.

--edit--

It would seem that my SATA controller is not one that splits the read tasks. My performance gains so far only seem to be that of the jump from an ATA100 drive to ATA150. Looks like I'll be setting up a RAID 0 array.

--edit--

Got it all working. Blazing fast speed and 320 gigabytes of space. And the inside of my case is a bit cleaner.

oh..thought it said steralized

The art of deceptive topics.

I usually talk about hard drives when I get sterilized too.

Usually? Just how many times have you been Sterilized?

About the same amount of times I impregnanted your mother.

Which leaves one very important question.

Are you my daddy?

I did a RAID0 once but it didn't do much but cut down access times. Didn't really get any increased bandwidth out of it. Decided afterwards that it was better just running the drives separately so I only chanced half my data at a time.

Well, if you're only running one hard drive, you're taking the same chance. I measured the results. A single sata drive on my system made about 60 megabytes/sec. The RAID 0 array is right around 90 megabytes/sec. I'm running a 64 kbyte stripe size, which most people seem to think is the best compromise between splitting the data and over-working the RAID controller.

PowerMatt Wrote:Well, if you're only running one hard drive, you're taking the same chance. I measured the results. A single sata drive on my system made about 60 megabytes/sec. The RAID 0 array is right around 90 megabytes/sec. I'm running a 64 kbyte stripe size, which most people seem to think is the best compromise between splitting the data and over-working the RAID controller.

What I've read from most editorials on the subject, you'll get that kind of performance in a synthetic test, but the real world stuff is quite different. If you're only running one hard drive, you're not thinking about RAID anyway. My point was, you run RAID 0, you chance all of your data. You run two separate drives, you'll only chance half of it at a time (since the odds of both drives dying simultaneously is low).