Looking for Hard Drive selection advice --> Raid0 using P4C800E Deluxe Promise Controller

[Guess Who]

I am considering adding 2 hard drives to my system in a Raid 0
configuration using the Promise controller built into my P4C800E
Deluxe MB. I am not sure what hard drives I should purchase for this
though. I would appreciate any suggestions.

Ideally I would like to add two 250+Gb hard drives and have them
appear in XP Pro as one large volume. After reading many of the
threads in this forum, I am confused. Should I purchase 2 SATA drives
or 1 SATA and 1 PATA. What will give me the best performance using
the built in Promise raid controller?

Right now I am leaning towards 2 Western Digital 250Gb SATA 7200 rpm
w/8mb cache (WD2500JD). Are these drives going to hold up in a RAID
environment? Is it worth the extra $ for the Caviar RAID Edition
Series (WD2500SD)? These drives are going to be installed on a
workstation (not a server) so they won't be under heavy use all the
time. Should I be looking at a different manufacturer?

Here is my system configuration (purchased the end of May) as it
stands now:
Motherboard: Asus P4C800E Deluxe
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz
RAM: 2Gb of Corsair Extreme PC3200
Power Supply: Enermax 460W
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Hard Drive: Western Digital 250Gb SATA 7200rpm w/8mb cache (WD2500JD)
DVDRom: Lite-on 16x
DVR: Pioneer DVR-107

I would appreciate any suggestion,
Wade

 

[Paul]

I am considering adding 2 hard drives to my system in a Raid 0
configuration using the Promise controller built into my P4C800E
Deluxe MB. I am not sure what hard drives I should purchase for this
though. I would appreciate any suggestions.

Ideally I would like to add two 250+Gb hard drives and have them
appear in XP Pro as one large volume. After reading many of the
threads in this forum, I am confused. Should I purchase 2 SATA drives
or 1 SATA and 1 PATA. What will give me the best performance using
the built in Promise raid controller?

Right now I am leaning towards 2 Western Digital 250Gb SATA 7200 rpm
w/8mb cache (WD2500JD). Are these drives going to hold up in a RAID
environment? Is it worth the extra $ for the Caviar RAID Edition
Series (WD2500SD)? These drives are going to be installed on a
workstation (not a server) so they won't be under heavy use all the
time. Should I be looking at a different manufacturer?

Here is my system configuration (purchased the end of May) as it
stands now:
Motherboard: Asus P4C800E Deluxe
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz
RAM: 2Gb of Corsair Extreme PC3200
Power Supply: Enermax 460W
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Hard Drive: Western Digital 250Gb SATA 7200rpm w/8mb cache (WD2500JD)
DVDRom: Lite-on 16x
DVR: Pioneer DVR-107

I would appreciate any suggestion,
Wade

This site has info on disks.
http://www.storagereview.com/

There are plenty of other issues with a project like
this, and a motherboard group isn't likely to answer
them for you. For example, at what size do Windows tools
stop working ? How do you back up 500GB of data ?
What operations work and don't work with dynamic disks
(one way to make a large volume) ?

Try typing "large array" in the search box here:
http://forums.2cpu.com/search.php

Paul

 

[Guess Who]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the links. I will definetly check them out. I posted here
to see if there were any quirks/'things to be aware of' with the raid
controller built into my MB.

Thanks again for the help,
Wade

 

[TomC]

Wade;

Are you sure that RAID 0 is going to improve your performance?
From Anandtech:
( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11 )
Final Words
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is
no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real
world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in
reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes
RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular
application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and
obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for
the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and
stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them
into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit
of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the
improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky
and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

TomC

 

[Michael S.]

I agree with what most of what TomC indicated about RAID 0--BUT, have a
difficult time understanding why RAID 0 would halve the mtbf times--since
RAID 0 would split the work between two drives, each working half as much.
Also, using WD Raptors, the mtbf is so long that it eclipses other S-ATA or
PATA drives anyway. However, in basic agreement with TomC, whenever I
reload Windows XP and all applications next time, I will go to no RAID at
all. I benchmarked my system using several benchmark programs with (A) no
RAID, (B) RAID 0 and (C) RAID 1 and did NOT notice enough difference to
justify RAID 0. But since RAID 0 was the last configuration I used, I just
left it there and after adding more and more software, decided to leave it
for now.

MikeSp
---------------------------------------------

 

[Milleron]

Wade;

Are you sure that RAID 0 is going to improve your performance?
From Anandtech:
( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11 )
Final Words
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is
no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real
world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in
reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes
RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular
application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and
obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for
the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and
stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them
into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit
of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the
improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky
and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

TomC

Thank you, TomC!! Your advice needs to be included in all threads
about RAID 0 on personal desktops.

To the original poster, PLEASE consider forgetting about RAID 0
altogether. I haven't been burned yet, but I'm very sorry I built my
last PC with RAID 0. It's just nonsense for the VAST majority of
personal PC users. You will see many, many posters who rave about
their RAID 0 performance, but you will never see them post any
benchmarks. They're just wanting to feel good about their shiny new
go-faster thingy. Whenever reputable labs do the benchmarks, it
always turns out that there is no performance enhancement that is
actually *perceptible* to the desktop user. All you get for you
effort and money is another thing to go wrong and TWICE the chance of
hard drive failure that will result in data loss.
Ron

 

[Milleron]

I agree with what most of what TomC indicated about RAID 0--BUT, have a
difficult time understanding why RAID 0 would halve the mtbf times--since
RAID 0 would split the work between two drives, each working half as much.

Think about it -- in RAID 0, both drives continue to rotate 7,200
times per minute, and each time there's a read or write, BOTH drive's
heads have to move. In RAID 0, both drives are working fully as much
as if they were single, NOT half as much. The chance of a failure is
doubled. There's no difference of opinion about that among all the
authors who have done benchmarking studies on RAID 0.

Also, using WD Raptors, the mtbf is so long that it eclipses other S-ATA or
PATA drives anyway. However, in basic agreement with TomC, whenever I
reload Windows XP and all applications next time, I will go to no RAID at
all. I benchmarked my system using several benchmark programs with (A) no
RAID, (B) RAID 0 and (C) RAID 1 and did NOT notice enough difference to
justify RAID 0. But since RAID 0 was the last configuration I used, I just
left it there and after adding more and more software, decided to leave it
for now.

Same here. I'll never build another desktop with RAID 0.

snip
Ron

 

[TomC]

Michael;

I have only installed one Raptor, a 37GB, and though it was every quiet at
idle, seeks were noisy enough that I removed the drive. It sounded like a
typical hard drive in about 1985. I would not enjoy listening to two. Maybe
the larger Raptors are quieter.

I still do not understand why RAID 0 does not increase real-world
performance. It should work, but doesn't. I have yet to read a clear
explanation.

As for the mtbf times (and the quote was from Anandtech, not me), the
platters of both drives are alway spinning at the same rate, heat is slowly
damaging both drives at the same rate, and it is not obvious to me that the
actuator, heads etc. will have half the wear on a drive that is part of a
RAID 0 array than on a single drive. Reduced wear, probably, half the wear,
I doubt it.

TomC

 

[Guess Who]

Thanks to all that took the time to comment.

I am re-evaluating my plan. After reading your comments and reading
info from the threads that Paul provided, I think I am going to pass
on the Raid 0.

I still have a lot more research to do to make sure I have a good
understanding of my options. If I had to make a purchase now, I think
I would do the following:
-Purchase a 10,000rpm 36Gb HD (probably a raptor)
-Purchase two WD250GB SATA HDs
-Purchase a LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 Raid Controller (selected
based on a review from www.tomshardware.com)
-Move the OS from my existing 250GB drive to the 36Gb [I am not sure
how I can do this though. May have to re-install XP ]
-Create a RAID 5 with the three 250Gb drives and in the future add a
4th when I can afford it.

From what I read, this should give a considerable increase in
performance as well as give me some redundancy. This approach is a
lot more cash, but I don't mind spending money on quality.

I would appreciate any of your comments. You all have been extremely
helpful. Thanks again,
Wade

 

[Milleron]

Thanks to all that took the time to comment.

I am re-evaluating my plan. After reading your comments and reading
info from the threads that Paul provided, I think I am going to pass
on the Raid 0.

I still have a lot more research to do to make sure I have a good
understanding of my options. If I had to make a purchase now, I think
I would do the following:
-Purchase a 10,000rpm 36Gb HD (probably a raptor)
-Purchase two WD250GB SATA HDs
-Purchase a LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 Raid Controller (selected
based on a review from www.tomshardware.com)
-Move the OS from my existing 250GB drive to the 36Gb [I am not sure
how I can do this though. May have to re-install XP ]
-Create a RAID 5 with the three 250Gb drives and in the future add a
4th when I can afford it.

If you're a hobbyist who gets true enjoyment out of having the fastest
most powerful system extant regardless of the cost and you have
unlimited funds, go for it. On the other hand, if you have any
practical use for this machine, just install a RAID 1 or else leave
out RAID and use one of the 250-GB drives to do daily imaging of the
OS drive and the other HD. I haven't been around the world twice, but
I don't think I've ever heard of a RAID 5 in a computer that was used
for something other than a mission-critical server. You never said
what this computer is to be used for. If you gave a clear picture of
your goal, experts (and I'm not one), could give you more pertinent
advice.

From what I read, this should give a considerable increase in
performance as well as give me some redundancy. This approach is a
lot more cash, but I don't mind spending money on quality.

I would appreciate any of your comments. You all have been extremely
helpful. Thanks again,
Wade

Ron

 

[Guess Who]

Hi Ron,

I guess I would fall into the hobbyist/enthusiast category.
Basically, I am looking for a way to increase the throughput of my
hard drive(s). I do a lot of video editing with my machine using
files that are several gigs. I find myself waiting for them hard
drive to load the info into ram.

I also use Newsbin with my giganews account. Since giganews has such
good retention, some of the binary groups have spool files (group
headers) that are 2.5+gb. I was hoping to find a way to make my
drives more efficient so they would load more quickly.

I could give more examples, but basically it boils down to "I am
often waiting for my machine and the delay is caused by the hard
drive".

While I don't have millions of $ at my disposal, I can afford to spend
some cash for more hard drives. This would alleviate my need for more
hd space, but it doesn't help my throughput concern. I was hoping by
spending the cash for a decent Raid controller I could have a much
faster setup. Having redundancy is a big plus too.

Basically that is why I started looking at a Raid in the first place.
Is the improvement a raid 5 array would provide me not worth the cost?
I assumed that it would be considerably faster than reading/writing to
individual drives. I am beginning to think that I will have to live
with the transfer rates I have now.

Thanks for the help,
Wade

 

[Noozer]

Hi Ron,

I guess I would fall into the hobbyist/enthusiast category.
Basically, I am looking for a way to increase the throughput of my
hard drive(s). I do a lot of video editing with my machine using
files that are several gigs. I find myself waiting for them hard
drive to load the info into ram.

I also use Newsbin with my giganews account. Since giganews has such
good retention, some of the binary groups have spool files (group
headers) that are 2.5+gb. I was hoping to find a way to make my
drives more efficient so they would load more quickly.

I could give more examples, but basically it boils down to "I am
often waiting for my machine and the delay is caused by the hard
drive".

While I don't have millions of $ at my disposal, I can afford to spend
some cash for more hard drives. This would alleviate my need for more
hd space, but it doesn't help my throughput concern. I was hoping by
spending the cash for a decent Raid controller I could have a much
faster setup. Having redundancy is a big plus too.

Basically that is why I started looking at a Raid in the first place.
Is the improvement a raid 5 array would provide me not worth the cost?
I assumed that it would be considerably faster than reading/writing to
individual drives. I am beginning to think that I will have to live
with the transfer rates I have now.

Highpoint 1820A PCI-X 8 port SATA RAID controller will work in a PCI slot,
or you could get a PCI-X mainboard (NOT PCI-e) then you could get 8 drives
on there in RAID 5 for decent performance. (Currently configuring a system
with one of these cards in a 133Mhz PCI-X slot with 8 250meg Maxtor Maxline2
drive in RAID 5 - 2 Terabytes of space!)

With SATA RAID on a mainboard you could pair two WD Raptor drives together
in RAID 0, but you are increasing your data loss risk a little bit and I
don't know what kind of performance gain you'd have.

 

[Milleron]

Hi Ron,

I guess I would fall into the hobbyist/enthusiast category.
Basically, I am looking for a way to increase the throughput of my
hard drive(s). I do a lot of video editing with my machine using
files that are several gigs. I find myself waiting for them hard
drive to load the info into ram.

I also use Newsbin with my giganews account. Since giganews has such
good retention, some of the binary groups have spool files (group
headers) that are 2.5+gb. I was hoping to find a way to make my
drives more efficient so they would load more quickly.

I could give more examples, but basically it boils down to "I am
often waiting for my machine and the delay is caused by the hard
drive".

Thanks for the information. The fact that you do video editing with
gigabyte-sized files means that you are one of the few desktop users
who might, indeed, see perceptible performance increases with a
striped array. I don't know enough about it to say if RAID 5 would do
you any good, though. I've never even seen an article discussing RAID
5 on anything other than servers where I thought it was used mostly
for redundancy and hot-swappability rather than for performance
enhancement.

While I don't have millions of $ at my disposal, I can afford to spend
some cash for more hard drives. This would alleviate my need for more
hd space, but it doesn't help my throughput concern. I was hoping by
spending the cash for a decent Raid controller I could have a much
faster setup. Having redundancy is a big plus too.

Basically that is why I started looking at a Raid in the first place.
Is the improvement a raid 5 array would provide me not worth the cost?
I assumed that it would be considerably faster than reading/writing to
individual drives. I am beginning to think that I will have to live
with the transfer rates I have now.

Thanks for the help,
Wade

Ron

 

[Guess Who]

Hi Ron,

Based on your advice and my own research, I think I now have a plan of
action. I am going to buy a 74gb Raptor (newegg now has a $25 rebate)
for my OS. I will also buy two more WD 250Gb SATA drives. I will
work with them for a while as separate drives (1 for backup images and
2 for data). Sometime down the road I will put the 2 data drives into
a raid 0 configuration and see if there is a performance increase.

The software I intend to use to move my OS from my existing drive to
the raptor is Drive Image 7. I plan on using it to schedule/perform
backups as well. Do you know any other software that is better for
this (I am running XP Pro)?

Thanks a million for your help,
Wade

 

[Milleron]

Hi Ron,

Based on your advice and my own research, I think I now have a plan of
action. I am going to buy a 74gb Raptor (newegg now has a $25 rebate)
for my OS. I will also buy two more WD 250Gb SATA drives. I will
work with them for a while as separate drives (1 for backup images and
2 for data). Sometime down the road I will put the 2 data drives into
a raid 0 configuration and see if there is a performance increase.

The software I intend to use to move my OS from my existing drive to
the raptor is Drive Image 7. I plan on using it to schedule/perform
backups as well. Do you know any other software that is better for
this (I am running XP Pro)?

Sure do. Drive Image 7 cannot do incremental backups, so it's not
very useful for those of us who want to backup daily. The two
products to consider are Acronis True Image 8 and Symantec's (formerly
PowerQuest's) V2i Protector 2.0 Desktop edition. Both of these
imaging programs do incremental backups from within Windows -- i.e.,
neither reboots into a DOS environment like DI does. True Image costs
about $49 if memory serves, and V2i Protector is more. V2i requires
you to install .NET so instead of running from a floppy like DI did,
it's an installation of many megabytes, but it's more configurable
than True Image. With True Image, setting the size of the image files
to anything other than "automatic" can be a nightmare, and the program
canNOT split the image files into 4.6GB pieces for later burning to
DVD-RW like V2i can (ironically, True Image 7 COULD do this, but the
capability was lost with the "advance" to TI8). It CAN burn directly
to DVD, however. The problem with that, though, is that if your image
files are larger than 4.7 GB, you cannot do unattended backups because
of the necessity of feeding the computer new disks every 4.7 GB.
If you don't want to burn images to DVD for off-site storage, then TI8
is a wonderful program.
Restoring an entire C: partition is easier with V2i -- just boot from
the CD and it goes to Microsoft's own restore environment. From
there, it's easy to find the image files you want and get you back an
up-and running environment. TI8 allows you to create a bootable CD
with the full version of the software on it for restoration, too, so
there's not really a lot of difference between V2i and TI8 in this
area.
At any rate, either of these solutions is superior to Drive Image, and
I believe that Acronis offers a freely downloadable trial version.

Thanks a million for your help,
Wade

Ron

 

[Guess Who]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the information. I checked out both program's web pages
last night. The V2i page had a nice flash walkthrough and as you said
there is a free trial for True Image 8. I plan on taking advantage of
the trial before I make a purchase. So I will have a good
understanding of how each program works.

From what I have learned so far, both programs seem to do everything I
will need them to do. I have only one question that I haven't been
able to find an answer for. Both packages have a feature that moves
the contents of one hard drive to another. Both talk about moving the
info from a smaller hard drive to a bigger. I want to do just the
opposite. I want to move my OS from a 100Gb partition to a 74Gb
drive. There is only around 40Gb of info on my existing partition so
there is plenty of room on the new drive. Do you know if either of
these two programs can do this for me? This may be the deciding
factor as to which program I buy.

If there isn't a program that can do this for me, do you know if this
would work?
-Create a standard Win XP back up of my existing drive.
-Disconnect existing drive and connect new drive.
-Install XP on new drive.
-Restore backup.

I would really like to avoid re-installing my OS and all my programs
if possible.

Thanks for all your help. I can only imagine the amount of time, and
money for that matter, that you have saved me.

Thank you very much,
Wade

 

[Milleron]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the information. I checked out both program's web pages
last night. The V2i page had a nice flash walkthrough and as you said
there is a free trial for True Image 8. I plan on taking advantage of
the trial before I make a purchase. So I will have a good
understanding of how each program works.

From what I have learned so far, both programs seem to do everything I
will need them to do. I have only one question that I haven't been
able to find an answer for. Both packages have a feature that moves
the contents of one hard drive to another. Both talk about moving the
info from a smaller hard drive to a bigger. I want to do just the
opposite. I want to move my OS from a 100Gb partition to a 74Gb
drive. There is only around 40Gb of info on my existing partition so
there is plenty of room on the new drive. Do you know if either of
these two programs can do this for me? This may be the deciding
factor as to which program I buy.

Both will do that. No problem at all. They do NOT include empty
sectors in their backup images, so the image of 40 GB of files on a
100-GB partition is only 40 GB in size (actually less with
compression, but the point is that the image is not the same size as
the partition but always smaller). I have NOT done this myself, but I
see no problem. I believe that the tech-support or customer-service
people at both sites should be willing to answer that question posed
to them in an email before you make the purchase, though.
Also, Acronis has user forums on their site where you can post the
question and get back an answer from someone more experienced than I.

If there isn't a program that can do this for me, do you know if this
would work?
-Create a standard Win XP back up of my existing drive.
-Disconnect existing drive and connect new drive.
-Install XP on new drive.
-Restore backup.

That should work nicely with Drive Image 7, and if the only component
being changed is the HD, there should be no problem with Windows
Activation, either. With Drive Image, you wouldn't have to even
install Windows -- just boot from the DI floppy and restore the backup
on another drive to the new drive. Of course, this function is one
that's specifically designed into True Image and, if I recall, V2i
Protector.

I would really like to avoid re-installing my OS and all my programs
if possible.

Thanks for all your help. I can only imagine the amount of time, and
money for that matter, that you have saved me.

Thank you very much,
Wade

Ron

 

[Guess Who]

Hi Ron,

Thanks again for all your help. I played around with TI8 last night.
It is very easy and straightforward to use. Using an old machine, I
was able to move info from a large partition to a smaller. Worked
like a champ.

Since I now have a solid plan, I have ordered the new drives . I
bought TI8, a Raptor 74Gb drive and two 250Gb Hitachi SATA drives. My
existing WD 250Gb drive will hold all my backup images for my 3
machines. The Raptor will be my OS drive and the Hitachis will be my
main data drives.

Thanks again for taking the time to help me out,
Wade