RAID 0 or have apps on seperate drive

[ridergroov]

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.

 

[DaveW]

Putting your applications on a separate harddrive controller will NOT
increase your speed at all.

 

[ridergroov]

Really? I figured having the OS do it's operations on a seperate drive
from where the apps are doing their work would increase performance.
Hm. I guess I have my answer. Thanks!

 

[Clint]

If you're talking about putting your apps on a different physical HD than
your OS, then yes, you MAY see a performance difference. You may also see
an increase in performance if you use two drives in a RAID 0 array. It
depends on the applications, and whether you're reading or writing, and
other parameters.

But in your original post, you were talking about separate HD controllers,
for some reason. So the response that you wouldn't see an increase in
performance based on moving to two controllers is an answer to a different
question than whether you should have the OS on a different drive than the
apps.

Clint

 

[ridergroov]

Okay, what i meant was either running my OS on one hard drive and my
apps on a seperate controller and hard drive, as they are both
SATA....or...running the two drives in a RAID 0. I always ran my apps
on a different physical drive and controller until recently when I
switched to a different mobo and I was thinking about trying something
different for a change. The performance I got with the apps and os on
different drives/controllers was very good to me. After changing mobos
though I thought that since I wasn't doing that for the time being that
that was the problem but it is starting ot shape out to be mobo
limitations in bus speeds and RAM architecture. Real annoying. I
think I may give the RAID 0 a try. Thanks.

 

[Paul]

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

 

[ridergroov]

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.

 

[Paul]

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

 

[Rod Speed]

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,

Hardly anyone does backup that way.

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.

No need to do a 'survey'

My last disk failed while it was just sitting
there. I didn't kick the table or anything.

 

[Ed Medlin]

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.

I have two SATA drives, set as single drives, for my OS and apps. I would
not use a Raid 0 for anything critical. For video editing I have one SATA
Raid 0 and another EIDE pair in Raid 0 and do my video work between those
two arrays since I get a noticeable speed increase that way. As far as any
videos that are important for me to keep, I copy them over to one of the
single drives (separate partitions for "Saved Videos") and make another copy
to a DVDRW. I like redundancy for my really important 'stuff'. I look at
the Raid 0 arrays as something that could go at any time even though both
arrays have relatively new drives.

Ed

 

[John Weiss]

I tried RAID 0 when I got my new machine a couple years ago. The
performance was very good, but I wound up having to re-install EVERYTHING
when the RAID array failed during what should have been a simple Windows
update. I re-installed as RAID 1 instead...

RAID 0 is nice for performance, but absolutely intolerant of errors. Any
glitch, whether hardware or Windows induced, can cause you to lose
everything. May not be a disaster if you keep your backups up to date, but
a pain in the @$$ at minimum.

Assuming 2 physical HDs of equal performance, you can see some gains by
separating OS and apps. Depending on specific usage, you can also
experiment with moving the pagefile to the second HD along with the apps
(though if data and apps are on the same HD, the pagefile will probably be
better off on the boot drive).

Just remember that a SATA controller on a 32-bit PCI card will have the same
bandwidth limitations as any PCI device -- 133 MBbps for the entire bus. If
you have lots of stuff on the PCI bus, keep the HDs on the on-board SATA
controller.

 

[John Weiss]

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.

I see NO reason to use RAID 0 in a file server! You have no application
load on the CPU, and the network or I/O on your other computer is likely
your choke point. Besides, can you afford to lose a week's worth of data?

 

[ridergroov]

John,

I see your points as well. I don't have anything that I use weekly at
home that I couldn't lose a week's worth and if I went with the raid 0
I would probably go with a 2x week backup anyway. If I went with the
split OS on one HD and Apps on another, I would still have to reinstall
everything if one of those failed anyway in the same token I would have
to reinstall if I had a single failure of one of my RAID 0. Either way
you are reinstalling everything unless you do the RAID 1. I did that
for awhile and wasn't really too into the performance. It was nice to
know everything was constantly backing up but, the performance was less
than i would like.

 

[Clint]

RAID 1 isn't a magical solution either. It may protect you against problems
with the HD's themselves, but it's not a fix for a bad MB, viruses, SUS,
etc. IOW, none of the RAID solutions are a replacement for a proper backup
strategy, which it sounds like you have under control. Identifying risk and
acceptable losses...

Clint

 

[frodo]

I see your points as well. I don't have anything that I use weekly at
home that I couldn't lose a week's worth and if I went with the raid 0
I would probably go with a 2x week backup anyway. If I went with the
split OS on one HD and Apps on another, I would still have to reinstall
everything if one of those failed anyway in the same token I would have
to reinstall if I had a single failure of one of my RAID 0. Either way
you are reinstalling everything unless you do the RAID 1.

exactly; regardless if it's a single drive or a dual-drive-raid-0, if a
drive fails you have to rebuild. same diff.

I did that
for awhile and wasn't really too into the performance. It was nice to
know everything was constantly backing up but, the performance was less
than i would like.

Raid 0 will improve performance in (only) a few noticable ways:

- booting and app launching
- defragging / disk checking
- disk searches
- large copies/moves
- backups
- large file transcodes

To some that may be enough, others may feel it isn't worth it. The first
item is fairly trivial (30 sec boot vs 50 secs, 2 sec launch vs 4 secs).
Defragging is a lot faster (less than 1/2 the time), the other stuff about
50% faster too. [tip: go w/ a large stripe size, use the default
recommended by your driver, probably 128K. smaller stripes DO produce
better benchmark scores, but that is not real world - stick w/ the
default].

I have used raid 0 for years, never had a (you know...don't tempt fate!),
and I do notice the speed diff when I sit in front of another similar
machine w/o it. But it is not a magic bullet that makes your machine a
lot faster, just noticably faster.

Probably the biggest issue w/ raid 0 is finding a good imager that will
support it in all ways; True Image is the only one that does it well, and
the latest Ghosts can handle it, tho not as well.

 

[ridergroov]

I'm confused..you do recommended it or not? Also, why do I need a good
imaging program? Thanks.

I see your points as well. I don't have anything that I use weekly at
home that I couldn't lose a week's worth and if I went with the raid 0
I would probably go with a 2x week backup anyway. If I went with the
split OS on one HD and Apps on another, I would still have to reinstall
everything if one of those failed anyway in the same token I would have
to reinstall if I had a single failure of one of my RAID 0. Either way
you are reinstalling everything unless you do the RAID 1.

exactly; regardless if it's a single drive or a dual-drive-raid-0, if a
drive fails you have to rebuild. same diff.

I did that
for awhile and wasn't really too into the performance. It was nice to
know everything was constantly backing up but, the performance was less
than i would like.

Raid 0 will improve performance in (only) a few noticable ways:

- booting and app launching
- defragging / disk checking
- disk searches
- large copies/moves
- backups
- large file transcodes

To some that may be enough, others may feel it isn't worth it. The first
item is fairly trivial (30 sec boot vs 50 secs, 2 sec launch vs 4 secs).
Defragging is a lot faster (less than 1/2 the time), the other stuff about
50% faster too. [tip: go w/ a large stripe size, use the default
recommended by your driver, probably 128K. smaller stripes DO produce
better benchmark scores, but that is not real world - stick w/ the
default].

I have used raid 0 for years, never had a (you know...don't tempt fate!),
and I do notice the speed diff when I sit in front of another similar
machine w/o it. But it is not a magic bullet that makes your machine a
lot faster, just noticably faster.

Probably the biggest issue w/ raid 0 is finding a good imager that will
support it in all ways; True Image is the only one that does it well, and
the latest Ghosts can handle it, tho not as well.

 

[frodo]

I'm confused..you do recommended it or not? Also, why do I need a good
imaging program? Thanks.

For my money, I do. But it's your decision. If your goal is better
performance, you will notice it; but keep good backups, as you say you
always do. Go for it, after all it's just a home PC, you won't loose $$
if it dies some day, just a couple of days time getting it up and going
again. If those terms are acceptable, then why not give it a try and see
for yourself?

A good imager will make an exact copy of your array, so you can restore it
easily if (and some will say "when") it craps out. [Obviously you need to
image to a differnet HD! The external usb 2.0 guys are real cheap these
days, or just throw one inside your case and connect its power cord only
when needed.]

 

[ridergroov]

Oh I c. YOu are saying some imaging programs wont' copy an array. I
use Acronis 9 for backups and imaging. Seems to work pretty good but I
don't know its policy on RAID arrays. Also, is it best to setup the
RAID in the RAID configurator from the mobo or set it up inside XP with
a dynamic disk config? THanks for all the info!

I'm confused..you do recommended it or not? Also, why do I need a good
imaging program? Thanks.

For my money, I do. But it's your decision. If your goal is better
performance, you will notice it; but keep good backups, as you say you
always do. Go for it, after all it's just a home PC, you won't loose $$
if it dies some day, just a couple of days time getting it up and going
again. If those terms are acceptable, then why not give it a try and see
for yourself?

A good imager will make an exact copy of your array, so you can restore it
easily if (and some will say "when") it craps out. [Obviously you need to
image to a differnet HD! The external usb 2.0 guys are real cheap these
days, or just throw one inside your case and connect its power cord only
when needed.]

 

[frodo]

Oh I c. YOu are saying some imaging programs wont' copy an array. I
use Acronis 9 for backups and imaging. Seems to work pretty good but I
don't know its policy on RAID arrays. Also, is it best to setup the
RAID in the RAID configurator from the mobo or set it up inside XP with
a dynamic disk config? THanks for all the info!

TU 9.0 can handle it - read its manual.

dynamic disks is NOT related to this discussion at all. that's an obscure
XP thingy; raid is "underneath" the OS.

To set up the raid you MUST use the motherboard "configurator", and then
partition-format-install to the array. i.e., start all over.

Unless you're setting up a new disk array to hold only data (not a bad
idea if you're a videophile w/ a TB of files), the real benefit would be
to rebuild the system w/ raid 0 as the boot disk, w/ XP on it. i.e., a
new clean install. not to be undertaken lightly, but an adventure, to be
sure!

and no, you won't be able to make the array and then restore the image of
your system that you already have. you have to build it from the ground
up.

My #1 standing advice to all has always been: if it ain't broken, don't
fix it. but if you do at least you know who to blame.

sounds like you might want to experiment on a "spare" system first.