Raid Advise

  • Thread starter Thread starter Schus
  • Start date Start date
S

Schus

I am purchasing a P4C800-E Deluxe and I was planning on buying 2 - 200g WD
sata. I presently have a UDMA 100g. Since I do alot of video editing I had
hoped to set the 2 - sata drives in serial and use the 100g as a data
storage disk. After reading all of the posts concerning Raid I must admit I
am confused. If I did do as I proposed I'm not sure how best to set them up
for optimum speed. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Schus:

Do it right !

What you want is a Ultra320 SCSI controller (or Ultra320 SCSI RAID controller) and
Ultra160/320 SCSI hard disks and create a RAID 5 array.
Thus you will have the best performance, capacity and fault tolerance, albeit, less in your
wallet.

Dave

| I am purchasing a P4C800-E Deluxe and I was planning on buying 2 - 200g WD
| sata. I presently have a UDMA 100g. Since I do alot of video editing I had
| hoped to set the 2 - sata drives in serial and use the 100g as a data
| storage disk. After reading all of the posts concerning Raid I must admit I
| am confused. If I did do as I proposed I'm not sure how best to set them up
| for optimum speed. Any help would be appreciated.
|
|
 
Your initial idea is a good one. Configure the two 200GB drives in a RAID0
(striped) array and use the PATA for storage/back-up. The total capacity of
the array will be 400GB. You can partition it into several logical drives
if it helps you organize your material.

Ron
 
If you wish to use a RAID setup as you stated, you have several options.
Two of the most common RAID setups are RAID 0 (striped) and RAID 1
(mirrored). RAID 0 provides faster performance, because when you set up the
RAID array, it formats two disks to be used as one. (The controller sees it
as one big hard disk. If you have two 200gb drives as I understood you to
say, it would see the array as one 400gb drive. That's big. I don't know
if an array that size would cause problems, as some motherboards have size
limitations...) This, theoretically but not realistically, doubles the rate
at which data is written to your drives. I say theoretically because it is
not quite twice the normal speed, from benchmarks you read about. This type
of setup provides great performance, but doubles the risk of a hardware
failure - if you lose one hard drive of the two, you lose everything, as all
the date is spread out between the two drives. If you are looking for
optimum speed, this is your choice.

Your second option RAID 1. This sets up two drives to handle identical
data, hence "mirror." All the data is written to both disks. Two 200gb
drives would show up as 200gb, since they both contain the same data. The
advantage here is security - if one drive fails, the other continues to work
without a hitch. The problem is, the performance is not as good as RAID 0,
because the data transfer rate operates at a speed no faster than normal.

Another option is RAID 0+1, which is a combination of both of the above.
Four hard drives are required. Two are striped, increasing speed, and two
are mirrored, providing disaster recovery, but of course there is more
expense with purchasing four drives.

I hope this wasn't too simplistic, but I assumed you were in the dark about
how RAID worked. Hope this helped...

TG
 
Thanks to all it was uplifting. I've ordered the drives but I'm not sure
which way I'll go for sure but I suspect I'll go Raid 0. Since most of the
data will be able to be replaced if one of my drives fails under raid 0 and
my other drive as a data storage disc I think this will be the way to go.

Again thanks to all, I'm sure I'll have a ton of questions once all of my
hardware arrives. This is only my 5th PC I've built, seems like I'm always
learning.
 
If you wish to use a RAID setup as you stated, you have several options.
Two of the most common RAID setups are RAID 0 (striped) and RAID 1
(mirrored). RAID 0 provides faster performance, because when you set up the
RAID array, it formats two disks to be used as one. (The controller sees it
as one big hard disk. If you have two 200gb drives as I understood you to
say, it would see the array as one 400gb drive. That's big. I don't know
if an array that size would cause problems, as some motherboards have size
limitations...) This, theoretically but not realistically, doubles the rate
at which data is written to your drives. I say theoretically because it is
not quite twice the normal speed, from benchmarks you read about. This type
of setup provides great performance, but doubles the risk of a hardware
failure - if you lose one hard drive of the two, you lose everything, as all
the date is spread out between the two drives. If you are looking for
optimum speed, this is your choice.

Your second option is RAID 1. This sets up two drives to handle identical
data, hence "mirror." All the data is written to both disks. Two 200gb
drives would show up as 200gb, since they both contain the same data. The
advantage here is security - if one drive fails, the other continues to work
without a hitch. The problem is, the performance is not as good as RAID 0,
because the data transfer rate operates at a speed no faster than normal.

Another option is RAID 0+1, which is a combination of both of the above.
Four hard drives are required. Two are striped, increasing speed, and two
are mirrored, providing disaster recovery, but of course there is more
expense with purchasing four drives.

I hope this wasn't too simplistic, but I assumed you were in the dark about
how RAID worked. Hope this helped...

TG
 
If you wish to use a RAID setup as you stated, you have several options.
Two of the most common RAID setups are RAID 0 (striped) and RAID 1
(mirrored). RAID 0 provides faster performance, because when you set up the
RAID array, it formats two disks to be used as one. (The controller sees it
as one big hard disk. If you have two 200gb drives as I understood you to
say, it would see the array as one 400gb drive. That's big. I don't know
if an array that size would cause problems, as some motherboards have size
limitations...) This, theoretically but not realistically, doubles the rate
at which data is written to your drives. I say theoretically because it is
not quite twice the normal speed, from benchmarks you read about. This type
of setup provides great performance, but doubles the risk of a hardware
failure - if you lose one hard drive of the two, you lose everything, as all
the date is spread out between the two drives. If you are looking for
optimum speed, this is your choice.

Your second option RAID 1. This sets up two drives to handle identical
data, hence "mirror." All the data is written to both disks. Two 200gb
drives would show up as 200gb, since they both contain the same data. The
advantage here is security - if one drive fails, the other continues to work
without a hitch. The problem is, the performance is not as good as RAID 0,
because the data transfer rate operates at a speed no faster than normal.

Another option is RAID 0+1, which is a combination of both of the above.
Four hard drives are required. Two are striped, increasing speed, and two
are mirrored, providing disaster recovery, but of course there is more
expense with purchasing four drives.

I hope this wasn't too simplistic, but I assumed you were in the dark about
how RAID worked. Hope this helped...

TG
 
Thanks to all it was uplifting. I've ordered the drives but I'm not sure
which way I'll go for sure but I suspect I'll go Raid 0. Since most of the
data will be able to be replaced if one of my drives fails under raid 0 and
my other drive as a data storage disc I think this will be the way to go.
Click to expand...

Don't be surprised if you don't see any speedup improvement with RAID0.
This is very application workload dependent. Yes, you have multiple
spindles to handle the I/O load, and thus (as was mentioned previously)
theoretically twice as much I/O can be serviced in the same amount of time.

However, much of this will be dependent on the number of simultaneous I/Os
your application workload can handle. If you use it as a single-user
workstation, with a single application actually actively doing I/O at a
time; and if the application(s) being used issue a single I/O and wait for
completion before issuing the next one, then don't be surprised if you stil
see performance that matches a single drive's speed.
 
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