Benefits of RAID?

[Paulieg]

OK, I hate to admit. In all my years of fixing and building PC's, I've never set up a HD Raid configuration. Actually, I've never really paid attention to the benefits of setting up a Raid Array. Can someone give me a "quick and dirty" summary on the pros/cons of RAID, and maybe a quick reference guide to setting up RAID for the first time?

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

OK, I hate to admit. In all my years of fixing and building PC's, I've never set up a HD Raid configuration. Actually, I've never really paid attention to the benefits of setting up a Raid Array. Can someone give me a "quick and dirty" summary on the pros/cons of RAID, and maybe a quick reference guide to setting up RAID for the first time?

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=43572

:)

[DanTheBanjoman]

Quick/dirty: Redundancy and/or performance.

[Frogger]

http://reference.techpowerup.com/RAID

[Paulieg]

Ok, thanks for the links for a description of RAID. Anyone with a good "quick and dirty" on how to set up RAID 0 or RAID 1?

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

I know how to on an nVIDIA chipset, but not an Intel. Im assuming it would be more or less the same way but with Intel RAID drivers.

Take a look at this (http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=48273) thread and see if you can get any use out of it even though its for nVIDIA chipsets.

[Hawk1]

Your MB has a built in RAID controller (ICH9R). Your manual should have a step by step method to set up each type of RAID on that controller (if you dont have your manual, you can always download a copy here.) (http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard/Manual_Model.aspx?ProductID=2580) I never set up a RAID before either, but it was really easy. Just remember you will have to set your BIOS to run SATA RAID mode and it will require a OS reinstall with the F6 raid drivers (both XP and Vista - at least for my board). Good luck.

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

Once I get an Intel based motherboard, I will make a guide for setting up RAID for those type of chipsets.

And Hawk is correct. Even in Vista you need RAID drivers. However you do NOT need Sata drivers. Two seperate things.

At least with Vista, you can install the RAID drivers in more than one way unlike XP.

[AphexDreamer]

Read this great link http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/393

[BloodTotal]

that should be stickied, it a really good guide!

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=43572

[twicksisted]

I currently run a four disk Raid 0 setup, and a 2 disk raid 0 setup.
4X Western Digital 320gig RE16 drives in raid 0
2X Raptor 74gig drives in raid 0

On my girlfriends rig, she runs a standard 250gig samsung spinpoint and to be honest I dont notice a difference between the two systems in terms of boot up time and responsiveness.
There is no real difference becuase everything that we do on these machines, a standard 7200rpm HDD is quick enough really.
I guess in a multiple user and server environment, my raid would overtake a standard drive, but for one user on a personal computer its pointless.

I have run a few benchmarks on filesystem performance and read / write etc and in those tests they do really well, beating all other top drives in sisoft sandra etc... but in a real world situation, I do not notice the difference atall!

Also, having raid 0 means that you have no redundency and if one drive bites the dust, the whole raid array does and you lose everything. If you like overclocking, then everytime you have a BSOD brought on by pushing it too far, youll need to run CHKDSK as when you bootup your drives will be corrupted and wont boot. This is a major ballache, specially if you dont have a floppy drive permanently fixed into your pc and a driver disk with your raid drivers (as I dont)

To do this, youll need to startup using the windows install disk, press F6 to load up the raid drivers and go to the recovery console, then run CHKDSK. (this takes a while... snore)

All of this is a real pain in the ass for something that I cannot measure or see the point of ;)
just being honest here ... check it out if you think it will make a difference to your life, but I honestly dont think its worth it personally. :)

[allen337]

Ok, thanks for the links for a description of RAID. Anyone with a good "quick and dirty" on how to set up RAID 0 or RAID 1?


I assume you know how to hook up 2 or more hdds to your motherboard for 2 drives use sata 0 and sata1 on you motherboard. The Intel sata slots will have either 4 or 6 connections just start with however many drives you want on sata0-sata1-sata2-sata3 and so on.
First off you need to make a f6 floppy. Go here and get newest 32bit f6 insiall drivers, format a floppy drive and install them on it ~~ http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProductID=2101&DwnldID=14849&strOSs=44&OSFullName=Windows*%20XP%20Professional&lang=eng . Go into bios and find where you can enable onboard raid you probably have 2 raids on that gigabyte motherboard so youll have to figure out witch one is intel raid. Same as a win install just set your boot to cdrom. When you start booting you will see a intel matrix storage manager screen come up and all you need to do is start hitting ctrl + I to enter the raid bios. Once in the raid bios it pretty much is self explainitory, basicially you probably want speed so just select set up raid, stripped and select 64k stripped is the fastest or whatever your preference. Create the raid and exit the bios when you start booting to the windows cdrom it will say press f6 if you have and 3rd party drivers so you do start hitting f6 then it will go on for a couple minits and come up specify a location, here you got to hit S on keyboard and if you have that floppy in you made select the RAID driver on that disk and then enter, it will ask you if you have anymore rivers after that just hit enter again. Install windows as you usually do. ALLEN

[Hawk1]

I agree with twicksisted, I have not seen any real world performance of RAID vs non-RAID. Reason I did it was I heard there was a "perfomance" benefit, but also because it was something new to learn (it was also my first time Reinstalling XP, so lots of learning). Anyway, if its something you want to learn to do, go for it. If your expecting night and day performance gains, you may be disapointed (depending how you use your PC). RAID 1 will be beneficial if you have important data that is irreplacable.

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

that should be stickied, it a really good guide!

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=43572

Thanks! :toast:

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

I agree with twicksisted, I have not seen any real world performance of RAID vs non-RAID. Reason I did it was I heard there was a "perfomance" benefit, but also because it was something new to learn (it was also my first time Reinstalling XP, so lots of learning). Anyway, if its something you want to learn to do, go for it. If your expecting night and day performance gains, you may be disapointed (depending how you use your PC). RAID 1 will be beneficial if you have important data that is irreplacable.

I see some benefits over RAID vs non-RAID. First off, my boot time is faster but not by much. When copying a large file from my C drive to any other hard drive, it takes over half the time off compared to that of a non-RAID setup. I can copy 10GB of music from my C: drive to my D: drive in ~3 minutes.

I wont build myself another computer without RAID.

[flashstar]

The only issue with RAID is that it is often OS dependant unless you buy a true hardware RAID controller. For example, Nvidia has never made any RAID drivers for Linux. Thus, you have to use a purely software solution called DM RAID which results in a performance hit.

[Paulieg]

I currently run a four disk Raid 0 setup, and a 2 disk raid 0 setup.
4X Western Digital 320gig RE16 drives in raid 0
2X Raptor 74gig drives in raid 0

On my girlfriends rig, she runs a standard 250gig samsung spinpoint and to be honest I dont notice a difference between the two systems in terms of boot up time and responsiveness.
There is no real difference becuase everything that we do on these machines, a standard 7200rpm HDD is quick enough really.
I guess in a multiple user and server environment, my raid would overtake a standard drive, but for one user on a personal computer its pointless.

I have run a few benchmarks on filesystem performance and read / write etc and in those tests they do really well, beating all other top drives in sisoft sandra etc... but in a real world situation, I do not notice the difference atall!

Also, having raid 0 means that you have no redundency and if one drive bites the dust, the whole raid array does and you lose everything. If you like overclocking, then everytime you have a BSOD brought on by pushing it too far, youll need to run CHKDSK as when you bootup your drives will be corrupted and wont boot. This is a major ballache, specially if you dont have a floppy drive permanently fixed into your pc and a driver disk with your raid drivers (as I dont)

To do this, youll need to startup using the windows install disk, press F6 to load up the raid drivers and go to the recovery console, then run CHKDSK. (this takes a while... snore)

All of this is a real pain in the ass for something that I cannot measure or see the point of ;)
just being honest here ... check it out if you think it will make a difference to your life, but I honestly dont think its worth it personally. :)

Yeah, I'm not really into wasting time with stuff that does not reflect any real world performance for me...

[DanTheBanjoman]

What everyone seems to forget is that RAID 0 isn't a true RAID level (hence the 0) and the main purpose of RAID is data redundancy. The difference is way bigger than day and night when a drive files and instead of losing everything you get to keep all your holiday photos, months, pr0n, etc.

As for the performance, it is noticeable when you actually use your harddrive.


PS RAID doesn't mean you shouldn't make backups, controller could still crash, powersurge could kill multiple drives at once, fire rapes the whole array as well.

[Wile E]

I currently run a four disk Raid 0 setup, and a 2 disk raid 0 setup.
4X Western Digital 320gig RE16 drives in raid 0
2X Raptor 74gig drives in raid 0

On my girlfriends rig, she runs a standard 250gig samsung spinpoint and to be honest I dont notice a difference between the two systems in terms of boot up time and responsiveness.
There is no real difference becuase everything that we do on these machines, a standard 7200rpm HDD is quick enough really.
I guess in a multiple user and server environment, my raid would overtake a standard drive, but for one user on a personal computer its pointless.

I have run a few benchmarks on filesystem performance and read / write etc and in those tests they do really well, beating all other top drives in sisoft sandra etc... but in a real world situation, I do not notice the difference atall!

Also, having raid 0 means that you have no redundency and if one drive bites the dust, the whole raid array does and you lose everything. If you like overclocking, then everytime you have a BSOD brought on by pushing it too far, youll need to run CHKDSK as when you bootup your drives will be corrupted and wont boot. This is a major ballache, specially if you dont have a floppy drive permanently fixed into your pc and a driver disk with your raid drivers (as I dont)

To do this, youll need to startup using the windows install disk, press F6 to load up the raid drivers and go to the recovery console, then run CHKDSK. (this takes a while... snore)

All of this is a real pain in the ass for something that I cannot measure or see the point of ;)
just being honest here ... check it out if you think it will make a difference to your life, but I honestly dont think its worth it personally. :)
There are at least 2 things I can think of off the top of my head where a RAID0 benefits performance: Defrags and Virus scans.

[reverze]

I had two hard drives setup in a RAID 0 once..

Then I became smart and just picked up a nice Raptor.. ;)