Hard Drive Newb. Raid, SSD, and difference

[hercules71185]

Ok, I know how all the raid drives work, I know the differences, I also know what a SSD is and the theory of no moving parts.

Now, this is an ignorant question and maybe basically dumb. If you set up a raid say with my 2 500GB HDs with 32MB cache. Would I only have 500GB of space? Or would I have 1TB.

And SSDs what is the hype. They might have came a bit in tech in the last year. But, last I heard they used more power and were slower.

Then most people say since their PC is fast their boot up is faster. This is just the harddrive speed am I correct?

What benefits do you get from running raid or the raptor drives? Where do you get that speed. Just in the loading of games and scenes?

And 1 last thing. Did I do my numbers right when I purchases my hard drives today. I found a cheap set of hard drives @ comp usa. 500GB each and I got 2. For 100 dollars total. There was a TB for 90 but, I wanted to get 2 in case I decided to run raid I have the option. Now I got the ones I did when they had a cheaper one because of the numbers I saw. Did I do the right thing? I got the 32MB cache, instead of 8 or 16. Does this make a difference or should I have looked for something else?

[martini161]

it depends on what kind of raid you run. if you run raid one, youd have 500gb. if you ran raid 0, youd have 1tb. ssd's have better performance and use less power, i dont know who said otherwise but there wrong

[hercules71185]

http://storageeffect.com/2008/07/08/tom ... ,1955.html


I've seen more reviews, I see they do have faster ones now.

So Raid 1 I'd get my 1TB.. What type of performance gain would that yield.

[Skippman]

A lot of that's dependent on the controller you're using and how you build the RAID. If you do drive striping I'd say about a 10% increase in performance per drive added to the stripe. Really RAIDing wasn't intended to speed up access times, it was designed to increase redunandcy. I've considered doing a 3 drive stripe with parity so if I loose a drive I can recreate it.

[hercules71185]

Yea I understand the purpose behind what raid was supposed to be. But, never have I learned 1-5 broken down. I just know that there was a slight difference in performance. What hard drives would be faster than these? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136320
Those are the ones I picked up for 49 a few hours ago. But, from Comp usa. For Gaming and overall performance, would the raptor be worth my time? I mean 150 bucks for 74GB for the raptor. Is it noticeable? I see every benchmarking computer used they use it. Come on tho 74 GB is enough for 5 games now. If I use my common sense the numbers don't work, or I'm thinking of Cache wrong. 10000 RPMs @ 16mb cache vs 7200@32mb. Shouldn't that be faster? I was most likely taught wrong, but, what I heard is it's like a book. The space GB is like how many pages, the RPMs is how fast you can turn the pages, and the Cache is for when you read you can read 1,2,4,8,16,32 lines per scan.

[FZ1]

It's noticeable on large data loads but for most day to day computing, the difference is negligible. For gaming, you might see a few seconds shorter load time between levels etc. The bad thing about them is they can run hot, use a lot of juice and can be noisy. The cache doesn't have a big impact on most things. It's the RPM's on the platter is what is giving the performance boost.

[dicecca112]

SSDs are expensive, but access times and thus load times are much much faster. I'd wait for SSDs to come down in price. SSDs are also smaller in capacity, for a good SSD your looking at 500-1000$ for 64GB

[hercules71185]

awesome, thanks for all the answers it helped. Basically I'll run Raid 1 just to try it out and have my windows on my 80GB 32MB hard drive, and my games off the raid 1 set up, and have all of my pics and music on the raid and backed up on my external.

[Skippman]

RPM is what matters. Cache is nice, but it's only there to compensate for spin time. Think of it this way.

The drives is spinning and you can only write X amount of data per spin. That's not the whole chunch of the file. So rather than sending it piecemeal to the hard drive you dump it on it's cache, just like with level 1/2 cache on a proc vs RAM. The more cache you have, the more of the file you can preload to the read heads. If your drives fast enough the ammount of cache becomes unimportant as you're now writting data at twice the speed. This is a very rough description of what actually happens.

The most economical systems I've seen that don't use SSD's use a fast drive (Raptor, Baraccuda, etc) as the main boot drive and store the games as ISO's on a secondary drive. A hard drive is always faster than a CD/DVD ROM. So by installing from an emulated ISO file you can do a smaller install and keep the speed. That's what I've done for my rig. Had I the money, I'd replace my Raptor with a SSD and keep the SATA slave drive.

RAID is cool, but again, unless you're paying $$$ for dedicated controllers with onboard RAM and CPU's to manage the drives you're not really going to see a performance increase. It's ment for fault tollerance.

Remember, for basic questions that aren't specific places like Wikipedia are helpful for explaining things. They usually have illustrations. I know thier article on RAID technology is pretty decent.

[hercules71185]

Alright, I didn't know I would need a dedicated controller or CPU to make it worth while. If anything I can always just go and get the TB disk instead of having 4 hard drives.

[Skippman]

Alright, I didn't know I would need a dedicated controller or CPU to make it worth while. If anything I can always just go and get the TB disk instead of having 4 hard drives.

Understood. Most of these motherboards tout "onboard RAID". But they cannot compete with a true dedicated RAID controller like an Adaptec. True RAID cards are in the $200+ area as they're intended for enterprise use. Now you're starting to see why Raptor drives are so popular. I'd get a decent 10K+ RPM drive with a 16M+ cache as your boot drive and a large slave drive for images. Just don't leave every game you have installed. I have two drives and haven't filled either of them. But then again I only keep 4 or 5 games installed.

Right now I have Fallout 3, RA3, Crysis Warhead, and BF2 w/ all expansions installed. I still have 25G free on my Raptor drive.

[hercules71185]

haha, It wouldn't be so bad if all my games weren't saved as isos too. I keep a decent amount on here because I get in different moods. Like if I feel like drinking and playing around on the couch tigerwoods with a trackball works great. FPS for the most part and I play a few different ones. Then 60GBs of music (paid for) and 30Gbs of pics. Then I know I should back up my movies on DVDs, but I keep all of them on my drives.

[Skippman]

I've got a secondary PC for storage that acts as a media server. It's got about 2T of space that I use for my MP3's, Video Files, Data Backups, ISO storage, etc. GigE has made it silly for me to store files like that on my main PC now. That way I can keep my main PC slim and trim.

[hercules71185]

Thats an interesting idea.

[martini161]

i dont think you understand what i said, raid one wont get you a performance increase. raid one just means that if one drive dies than you can repair it and not lose anydata. raid 0 (which if talk about it on a merely technical/literal level, isnt raid) is what will get you a performance increase

[vicaphit]

Well, if you are storing the ISOs of all of your game disks so you don't have to load the disk every time you could put those on your 1T drive, and have all of the game installs on the Raptor. The disks usually don't have to be accessed after loading the game initially, so you would still have the performance and the ISOs on the larger drive.

[hercules71185]

Martini yea I got it now, I saw on a few benchmarks that the raid 1 had a slight performance gain. But, Raid 0 was the more noticeable one. Either way I figured it wasn't worth the hassle for 2%. And for Raid 0 losing half the storage is the same as buying a drive that costs twice as much right? lol. So it's not worth it I guess. I'll stick with the simple set up and maybe get a 10k raptor or SSD when the price drops.

[Skippman]

Martini yea I got it now, I saw on a few benchmarks that the raid 1 had a slight performance gain. But, Raid 0 was the more noticeable one. Either way I figured it wasn't worth the hassle for 2%. And for Raid 0 losing half the storage is the same as buying a drive that costs twice as much right? lol. So it's not worth it I guess. I'll stick with the simple set up and maybe get a 10k raptor or SSD when the price drops.

Well, that depends on the application. My goal is to eventually set my server up with 3 terrabyte (1TB per drive, 3 drives) mirrored (for 6 x 1TB drives). It's way overkill but I don't want to loose things like family photos and videos, etc.

[DMB2000uk]

Raid1 loses half the storage, not raid0.

Raid0 (two drives vs one drive) doubles the chance of failure and data loss though.

Dan