PSA: Two WD Raptors running in SATA RAID is a waste

[MuToiD_MaN]

I know this might sound stupid to someone who really knows hardware, because someone already razzed me for this, but I learned a valuable lesson about being too loose with my cash. So I bought a Athlon64 mobo that was the first I owned that had SATA ports on it. I decided to make use of this by buying a 74-gig WD Raptor, which, expectedly, was ultra-fast. Liking the results so much, I bought a second one to put in a RAID 0 (striping) array, thinking ultrafast + ultrafast = über....right?

Wrong.

The speed was the same as before. I had a nice, large storage space, but the cost-to-practical-gain ratio was terrible. According to a test at Tomshardware, random access times were actually slower, though large-volume transfers blew one drive out of the water. For practical situations like playing games and using Windows though, it's really not worth it.

Pros:
- Having a single-letter drive space with the speed of a 10000RPM SATA hard drive, at a storage size that's larger than any one 10000RPM SATA drive available (as far as I know).
- Impress your friends with how much you're willing to spend on your gaming rig

Cons:
- No worthwhile speed increase. For $400 I should have just bought a larger slower drive.
- Extra heat
- Double the opportunity for HD failure
- XP can be a bitch to install when you forgot to make a RAID driver disk (D'oh! ><)

 

[sinkoman]

Haha!

ultrafast + ultrafast = über....right?

Where on earth did you get that idea?

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

I REALLY want to know what made you think that two drives would be faster? It's not as if one drive is taking the load off the other. You either use one or the other!

 

[psyno]

Ok you're both wrong.

First, sinkoman, this is RAID. Read up. One drive does take load off the other.

Second, MuToiD_MaN, that random access time is slower is quite obvious. In order to read data (larger than stripe size), both harddrives need to access the right blocks.

Finally, increased data throughput is useful to the gamer, especially the gamer who hates waiting for levels to load.

You're right about heat and the probability of file system failure.

 

[WhiteZero]

Well, RAID only imporves seek time anyway, not transfer speed...

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Well, all I'm going by is the evaluation of my own performance. There might be another bottleneck though. I do only have 1G of RAM, and paging might keep things from going as fast as they could. Should I get a third 512, or a gig stick? I heard that there's the possibility of getting worse performance as the amount you have installed gets ridiculous.

 

[Icarusintel]

Well, all I'm going by is the evaluation of my own performance. There might be another bottleneck though. I do only have 1G of RAM, and paging might keep things from going as fast as they could. Should I get a third 512, or a gig stick? I heard that there's the possibility of getting worse performance as the amount you have installed gets ridiculous.

well, anything between 1 and 2 gigs should be just fine, and there's no problems having 2 gigs of ram, anything more right now is stupid, it will not help performance at all and may hurt it

 

[Asus]

I assume you are using the SATA ports built on the board for your RAID. What is the chipset? Link
FYI a dedicated RAID card will always be better than onboard RAID performance.

Also, it really depends what you are using it for because on some things you will see the boost while not on others. It is afterall marketed as a Workstation harddrive.
Anandtech

 

[sinkoman]

Ok you're both wrong.

First, sinkoman, this is RAID. Read up. One drive does take load off the other.

Hmm. It's to my understanding that the drives only take the load off one another when using raid one and five, and that raid zero allows both drives to be used as seperate drives, while using the others makes them all combined as on usable drive, thus taking the load off the others.

Oh well. I've never even USED raids zero one and five. Never had more than one sata hdd in a pc at a time. Currently running JBOD.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

hmm...okay i have a question which is just a tad off topic...but...
has the SATA technology improved alot since it first came out? i remember when i was shopping for a HD and at that time SATA was very new and i ended up not getting a SATA HD because the motherboard i chose had no support for it.

anyway, so has the technology improved? or is it basically the same as when it came out?

 

[psyno]

sinkoman, RAID 0 is just plain disk striping. Multiple drives appear to be one large device to the OS. With n drives, each drive gets 1/n of the data blocks. The advantages here are that you don't lose any of your storage space (unlike every other RAID level, where you lose some to redundancy or parity), and that n blocks can be written or read concurrently, each by a separate drive. You can see how this linearly improves performance (w.r.t. throughput) with increasing number of drives to a theoretical maximum of n times the read throughput and n times the write throughput of just one drive. Of course, lack of redundancy and increased probability of failure are real problems that need to be weighed against performance...

:cheers:

As far as SATA technology improvement, a little. Not that any drives and most arrays are coming close, but many controllers now offer 300 MB/s links vs. the initial 150 MB/s. One important improvement that some drives are implementing is Native Command Queuing (NCQ). All together, there is now a clear advantage to SATA over traditional ATA.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

As far as SATA technology improvement, a little. Not that any drives and most arrays are coming close, but many controllers now offer 300 MB/s links vs. the initial 150 MB/s. One important improvement that some drives are implementing is Native Command Queuing (NCQ). All together, there is now a clear advantage to SATA over traditional ATA.

umm..i am not too hardware savvy so forgive me for asking but these controllers ur talking about... are they a separate purchase from the SATA HD's ?
or are u saying that the controllers on these newer SATA HD's offer more MB/s links ??

if these newer controllers are part of the SATA HD's... how do u tell which drives have these newer controllers? specific models? certain brands? anything?
thanks.

 

[sinkoman]

He means add on pci cards that your sata hdds are attatched to.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

He means add on pci cards that your sata hdds are attatched to.

thanks
that clears up some confusion :thumbs:

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

I assume you are using the SATA ports built on the board for your RAID. What is the chipset? Link
FYI a dedicated RAID card will always be better than onboard RAID performance.

Also, it really depends what you are using it for because on some things you will see the boost while not on others. It is afterall marketed as a Workstation harddrive.
Anandtech

I have a Gigabyte K8NS which runs the NForce3 chipset, so I'm running onboard RAID. Good find on the study though!

 

[gweedodogg69]

I have 4 SATA Raptor drives. One drive is a JOBD drive and has XP, Office, and other basic apps. THe other 3 drives are RAID 0 and I install my games to that (HL2, Doom3, BF2, etc...) The games install and play REALLY fast so I don't know what your prob could be. Maybe cause you only have 2? But my system zooms.

 

[Razor]

I know this might sound stupid to someone who really knows hardware, because someone already razzed me for this, but I learned a valuable lesson about being too loose with my cash. So I bought a Athlon64 mobo that was the first I owned that had SATA ports on it. I decided to make use of this by buying a 74-gig WD Raptor, which, expectedly, was ultra-fast. Liking the results so much, I bought a second one to put in a RAID 0 (striping) array, thinking ultrafast + ultrafast = über....right?

Wrong.

The speed was the same as before. I had a nice, large storage space, but the cost-to-practical-gain ratio was terrible. According to a test at Tomshardware, random access times were actually slower, though large-volume transfers blew one drive out of the water. For practical situations like playing games and using Windows though, it's really not worth it.

Pros:
- Having a single-letter drive space with the speed of a 10000RPM SATA hard drive, at a storage size that's larger than any one 10000RPM SATA drive available (as far as I know).
- Impress your friends with how much you're willing to spend on your gaming rig

Cons:
- No worthwhile speed increase. For $400 I should have just bought a larger slower drive.
- Extra heat
- Double the opportunity for HD failure
- XP can be a bitch to install when you forgot to make a RAID driver disk (D'oh! ><)

I just had 35.6gig Raptor go in a raid 0 setup, still got to find the time to sort it out and format everything and figure out which drive is the crap one.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

I have 4 SATA Raptor drives. One drive is a JOBD drive and has XP, Office, and other basic apps. THe other 3 drives are RAID 0 and I install my games to that (HL2, Doom3, BF2, etc...) The games install and play REALLY fast so I don't know what your prob could be. Maybe cause you only have 2? But my system zooms.

4 SATA connectors? You must have a separate card, like Asus said?

 

[psyno]

No, look at his sig. He has an A8N-SLI Deluxe, which is an nForce4 board. That board has two SATA controllers, with 4 channels each.

 

[gweedodogg69]

yep. 1 is the nforce4 SATA controller, the other is a Silicon Image SATA controller. The silicon one kept screwin up on me so now im using the nforce 4 SATA controller.