Re: RAID 0 or have apps on seperate drive
- From: nospam@xxxxxxxxxx (Paul)
- Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2006 07:28:07 GMT
In article <1157428625.137486.230500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"ridergroov" <ridergroov1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I dfeinitely see your points Paul. My plan is to use this box in a
RAID 0 and I do weekly backups to an external so that should be okay.
I am pretty anal about my backups. I one point I was running a mirror
and doing backups every week. I dont' know why but I have always had
this fear that the drives will dump during a backup! Yeah that is a
bit insane but I guess anything is possible. How do you feel about the
RAID 0 if I am doing backups weekly? I am eventually just goign to use
this box as a file server and just run my iMac as my main computer. Am
I goign to notice a better performance running a RAID 0 over a RAID 1?
I'm pretyt much just trying to make this thing as fast as possible to
beef up for Vista. I have already run the beta on it and I wasn't
overly impressed. Here are the specs:
3.0ghz P4 1mb L2
2GB PC3200
WILL BE- Asus p4s800x..I think!
Maxtor 300Gb Sata 150s 16mb cache
It's not a bad machine at all, just needs a bit of a step up with
things starting to go towards gearing towards the dual core stuff. It
still cooks though.
As olong as you are aware of the exposures, give the RAID 0
a try.
Regarding your fear of the backup causing a dump, I suppose there
is more stress to the disk, by having the head flying around for
an hour when doing file-by-file backup. If you were doihg a bitmap
copy, the head would just proceed linearly across the disk. The
real question would be whether anyone has carries out of survey of
how many disks failed while doing backups, versus failures
while the disk is sitting there. My last disk failed while it
was just sitting there. I didn't kick the table or anything.
Just as some final datapoints to the "fast storage system"
hypothesis, these two articles review the Gigabyte I-RAM
RAM DISK board. It is a RAM DISK that connects to the system
via a SATA connector, rather than through the system bus.
It has close to zero seek time, but the bandwidth is limited
by the SATA interface, so its sustained transfers aren't
infinitely faster than a real hard drive.
In the first article, they use lots of synthetic benchmarks.
The thing looks like a killer.
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=1
In this second article, in the latter pages of the review, they
try the RAM disk in some typical desktop scenarios. While
the RAM disk does excel at some jobs (archiving is a lot
faster), there are also quite a few test cases that did
not benefit in a big way. So even though the RAM disk
is pretty ideal in terms of latency and bandwidth
figures, it doesn't give big user speed up in all cases.
It will still be possible to appreciate the improvements,
when you see them though.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=1
Paul
.
Paul wrote:
In article <1157392404.439932.320740@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"ridergroov" <ridergroov1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi folks. I'm trying to get the most performance out of my setup and
I'm wondering if the speed increase from using 2 drives in a RAID 0
array will be better performance than having my applications installed
on a seperate hard drive controller. Which should I do for speed?
Thanks.
RAID 0 is risky. It is the "striped for speed" option and
has no redundancy. If either disk fails, your data is lost,
and with the boot system on there, you cannot boot. RAID 0+1
or RAID 10 (they use four drives), gives speed and
reliability, but is complicated to run (when it breaks,
have fun figuring out what to do next). For desktop use,
I just don't see an up-side to RAID - more pain than anything
else, and needs backups just as much as a non-RAID system.
If you use RAID 0, you had better be doing backups every day.
There are a minimum of two disks, and if either fails, you'll
need your backup copy. The failure rate is higher.
Using one drive to hold your OS and apps, and using the second
drive for backups, is a lot safer, as then you have two copies.
Disconnecting the second drive (easy if the drive is in a USB
enclosure), reduces the wear and tear on the backup drive.
I used to have a computer with 7 drives on it, but after a
while the thrill wore off (too noisy). I had one drive failure
in there. I now stick to the "one drive, one backup" strategy.
The only time I'd consider RAID, might be if I was a video editor
or a Photoshop user, and I needed a fast array for streaming
raw video, or as a scratch while editing in Photoshop. Game
load times is a pretty poor excuse to be using RAID 0.
If you want real speed, work on reducing the seek time
of your storage system. I think you'd find a single
Raptor 10K RPM disk more impressive than a RAID 0
array. At least if you use a find command, without
a prebuilt index, the answer comes back a lot faster.
And compiling or any activity that visits a lot of
small files spread out over the disk, will also
complete faster.
Paul
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