OK does RAID make a difference or not for non-servers?

[John]

Sure obviously in some benchmarks it does.
When it first really getting popular because of IDE raid boards there
were several articles saying it didnt make much difference for the avg
person. Then I saw some sites pushing it so I assumed maybe with SATA
and newer HDs it made a difference in everyday use.

I asked a while back and people posted it probably doesnt.

Yet lots of people seemed to be doing it now.

So I did a search and a recent thing at some overclockers website says
nope , not much difference - at least in gaming. What everyone
generally says is they notice much faster loading of programs. That
seems to imply noticeably faster HD access which should impact almost
everything. However they say in everyday use it doesnt make much
difference and with games too.

I cant find any tests though with video and editing graphics. One guy
at Tweakers website says he records video and sound on his PC and it
has made a big difference but hes I think capturing video and sound
probably at some really high res. Ive tried capturing video
uncompressed - huge amounts of data and it worked fine without RAID.


http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/pg_2.htm


Also cooling.

Thermalright and others coolers and heatsinks are recommended by many
but there are posts where people claim they replaced their old cooler
with a thermalright heatsink and there was around a 2 degree change ,
fairly small.

Anyone get a dramatic difference when switching to one of the better
coolers?

Im thinking about it since I found Cooler Guys will ship by USPS if
requested at your own risk since FEDEX etc have ridiculously high
rates to Hawaii - around $25 minimum even for a screw or tiny fan.

 

[Michael Culley]

It makes a huge difference, basically doubling your hdd performance, but it only make a difference while your computer is accessing
your hdd. If you're in the middle of a game it most likely won't be accessing your hdd and you will notice zero difference. I had
raid on an amd 1.4 a while ago and it brought the speed of the hdd up from 35 to about 65 MB/sec. With today's drives the speed
would probably be much better.

But, you have to check what the performance of a drive twice its size would be, if you put in a pair of 120gb drives, will a single
240gb drive be quicker? I think bigger drives might be quicker because the bits of information are smaller and/or they read off more
platters at once but I have not confirmed this.

 

[Michael Culley]

The other thing to consider is the price of the drives. A pair of 120GB drives and a raid controller may be the same cost as a 350gb
drive.

 

[DaveinOlyWa]

RAID can make a hugh difference in any system. but you must realize
that caapturing video isnt going to highlight the advantages of a
RAID configuration.

In a RAID 0 config you can boost your hard drive performance by 50-75%
(in theory you should double your speed but then ye be dreaming) But
the most likely way you will actually see a difference is when
opeening large files or using a disk intensive graaphic programs.
some 3D modeling programs use memory mapped files for very large
files. When the file size can be upwards of 100-150 MB then you will
quickly notice the increased speed.

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.

 

[John]

On 31 May 2004 00:02:08 -0400,

RAID can make a hugh difference in any system. but you must realize
that caapturing video isnt going to highlight the advantages of a
RAID configuration.

In a RAID 0 config you can boost your hard drive performance by 50-75%
(in theory you should double your speed but then ye be dreaming) But
the most likely way you will actually see a difference is when
opeening large files or using a disk intensive graaphic programs.
some 3D modeling programs use memory mapped files for very large
files. When the file size can be upwards of 100-150 MB then you will
quickly notice the increased speed.

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.

Yeah still not sure about real life performance advantages. For
instance I searched again and there is a photoshop test which shows
obviously dramatic gains in disk performance. Yet it and zillions of
other sites make the point - more ram is way way way better.

And as long as you have a lot of ram and dont use gigantuan graphics
files , it might not even make a big difference.

So that gets me right back to square one.
So what happens with video editing etc. ?

Ive used Pinnacle Studio for instance and that slows to a crawl when
editing a 30 min mpeg2 file I captured. Sheer torture. But that was
before I added more ram to 1 gig.

Well anyway theres tons of sales going on again though they have been
sort of mediocre but I finally bought TWO cheapo hard disks to test
RAID so I can now test it.

I had a cheap $20 rebate deal Western Dig 40 gig I got a few months
ago 7200 8 meg cache and got the same thing today at Circuit City .

I have been looking for a 120 gig Maxtor but havent seen very many
Maxtor sales recently . In the old days it was ALL macxtor . Now its
mostly Seagate and WD. Also bought the Seagate 120 gig and was
thinking about paring that in a RAID config with the Maxtor 120 gig -
I used to read brand werent as important as SIZE matches obviously but
everyones suddenly pushing the line of getting the EXACT samething.



Heres a rundown of the deals going on this week in case anyone has
missed them -

120 seagate 7200 8 meg $59 Compusa after rebate - I think $50
40 gig WD 7200 8 meg $29 Circuit city $50 rebate ( they were taking
rainchecks )
160 gig I think ti was a WD 8 meg 7200 $69 CC

I think there were bigger ones too but I wasnt paying attention to
those.

256 DDR centon 2700 $25 after rebate CC
In the past a mediocre deal but now with ram going up pretty decent.
I think COMPUSA had the same thing Kingston for $27.


I suspect with some video editing since file sizes can be humongoid it
cant all be in ram --- it might make a big difference. But getting
more ram may also make a huge difference obviously on certain aspects
of editing. It might make SOME impact marginally with Photoshop .

I want to get another gig of ram and then Ill have two and test that.

 

[Michael Culley]

In a RAID 0 config you can boost your hard drive performance by 50-75%
(in theory you should double your speed but then ye be dreaming) But

Mine showed an increase from 35 meg to 65. I'm not sure if there was a problem with the program I used to test it but the results
showed better than 75% improvement.