[OT] More comp win

[MrTrip]

So, just added two of these to my setup today..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136744&cm_re=WD_Raptor-_-22-136-744-_-Product

RAID 0 setup....And I came out wiiittthhh


http://i.imgur.com/Yjm0P.png


My old drives got this ->
http://i.imgur.com/nqSg8.png


Backing up every sunday to a hotswap drive that doesn't stay in all the time.

Installed Windows 7 64bit Pro to the RAID and its just blazing fast.

I'm going to see about adding another drive to the whole setup.

Next upgrades...

3 750GB WD Drives (RAID5)
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDE00ZFBGRBOX

And finally...


ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5


Time to build a screamer :D

and Neocron will still get shitty fps

[Biglines]

my new system is slightly slower (1055t and gtx 460 factory overclocked to 700 mhz), but otherwise very similar. In global agenda I went from being lucky to get 16 fps (on my laptop), to 160 fps in GA on my new pc (if I don't turn on the fps limiter) :D enjoying it very much

is raid hard to get functioning? do the drives have to be identical?

[dodgefahrer]

Raid is easy to set into the BIOS and make it working.
Only problem u`ll have is u loosing a lo data if 1 hdd dies. (happens to me some time before and i lost about 1,5GB data :()

[Biglines]

Raid is easy to set into the BIOS and make it working.
Only problem u`ll have is u loosing a lo data if 1 hdd dies. (happens to me some time before and i lost about 1,5GB data :()
isnt the point of raid to be able to restore ur data from 1 drive if one of the other drives dies? (or 3 drives where 1 can die to be restored from the other 2 or something like that?

[L0KI]

isnt the point of raid to be able to restore ur data from 1 drive if one of the other drives dies? (or 3 drives where 1 can die to be restored from the other 2 or something like that?

There are a few RAID setups. If you set up a RAID mirror, it will mirror the data across 2 drives, and use both to access it. So... 250gb x2 HDD's = 250gb total storage.

So you're massively increasing read speed, for one. Also, IF one drive was to fail (let's face it, it happens), you can add another drive in of equal size (doesn't have to be iirc), and it will sync the mirror again.

The other option of course is a RAID stripe. This isn't really recommended, as you're effectively turning the 2 x 250gb HDDs into 1 x 500gb hard drive.

In my experience, after setting up a 4TB NAS drive which was 2x 2gb striped... one drive died, all data was lost. True story.

On the machine I use for compiling Android, I now have 2 x SSD drives set in a RAID 1 config (mirrored), and it is BLAZING fast to read and write data.

[Brammers]

In my experience, after setting up a 4TB NAS drive which was 2x 2gb striped... one drive died, all data was lost. True story.

OUCH! RAID0 is more dangerous than a pair of non-RAIDed drives.

If you can afford 3 drives, go for RAID5, which is stripping with distributed parity. You can loose one drive, and it will still work. However, loose another one you are screwed.

For reads it's fast, and writes are ok. However if you are using Linux software RAID5, it can be slow as hell with lots of small files, as I recently found out!

[MrTrip]

OUCH! RAID0 is more dangerous than a pair of non-RAIDed drives.

If you can afford 3 drives, go for RAID5, which is stripping with distributed parity. You can loose one drive, and it will still work. However, loose another one you are screwed.

For reads it's fast, and writes are ok. However if you are using Linux software RAID5, it can be slow as hell with lots of small files, as I recently found out!

Also watch out for NVIDIA's fake RAID5. If you drop a drive, there is a big chance you lose ALL data.

True story, JUST happened this weekend I'll share..

We had 3 750GB drives in a RAID5 storing backup sets from some of our customers. Our original setup was 6 RAID5's all 3 750GB drives. If one set failed we could continue backing up to the other sets.

When the company I work for implemented this, our original 2 RAID5 sets were on an NVIDIA controller, and life was OK. We were moving to LSI cards for true hardware based RAID5 when one of our sets took a dump on the NVIDIA. We attempted a rebuild and alas, all our data was gone. No warning that the data was going to be dumped, just happened.

We have since moved EVERYBODY that was on NVIDIA to either Stripe backing up to a hotswap or mirroring. NVIDIA does NOT do RAID5 in a proper way and can cause massive data loss. LESSON LEARNED.


I have my RAID0 backing up to a hotswap drive. I'm not worried about the data on the RAID0 as its only OS and a few games I'm currently playing. I'm pretty good at organizing my data.

I'm also looking at a few websites with used servers on them to build a NAS at my house to store all my important stuff on.


*** Should be noted that most motherboards with on board RAID do not do it in a true hardware sense. The bios assists with a type of emulated raid. The drivers take care of the rest. The only true hardware raid is to get a raid controller card, and trust me, when you do, you will see MASSIVE speed increases. To format our 1TB RAID5 took about a minute.

[yavimaya]

Raid is easy to set into the BIOS and make it working.
Only problem u`ll have is u loosing a lo data if 1 hdd dies. (happens to me some time before and i lost about 1,5GB data :()


haha yea, kinda sucks aye.
years ago me and my housemate had 800gb of xbox1 games lost due to once drive having power problems. :(

Raptors are nice, but they need to make better drives!
ive had raptors for years and cant see any different these days, especially when most of my large data is held on a 2nd drive :(


Loki, as far as i have always understood mirror was the same speed if not slower (as the data needs to be written twice) than a normal drive.
Stripe is for speed, as each drive takes roughly half the data from each file, effectivly doubling your read/write bandwidth.

have specs changed? or has mirror always increased speed? ive only ever used stripe.

[L0KI]

haha yea, kinda sucks aye.
years ago me and my housemate had 800gb of xbox1 games lost due to once drive having power problems. :(

Raptors are nice, but they need to make better drives!
ive had raptors for years and cant see any different these days, especially when most of my large data is held on a 2nd drive :(


Loki, as far as i have always understood mirror was the same speed if not slower (as the data needs to be written twice) than a normal drive.
Stripe is for speed, as each drive takes roughly half the data from each file, effectivly doubling your read/write bandwidth.

have specs changed? or has mirror always increased speed? ive only ever used stripe.

Raid0 definitely increases data read speed. Stripe does too I believe, but the mirror is safer!

[zii]

RAID1 If you are mirroring (Raid1) then the discs have to be identical (if these are not then depending on the raid implementation you'll loose the extra disc space, or you simply won't be able to create a mirror).

RAID0 - stripped. Only useful if your underlying structure is already on a RAID set-up. Don't do this on two discs unless you are content to loose the data at some point. One disc dead = all data lost.

Concatenation is another option, but pretty pointless as there is no performance gain. (Although we use it in work, but the concat., is a set of discs running over Raid5 on an EMC DMX, so I think this is out of scope! ).

RAID5 or 0+1 / 1+0 (and so on...) is the best way to go for speed and reliability. You need a few discs.

Saying all this: If you want blazing fast disc access on your home PC, and you take regular backups, and you are prepared to restore everything if your discs go !pop! into black smoke, then stripe these. Yep!
I've never had a disc crash on my home kit, because I am not really using the discs for more than torrents (no real I/O), photographic work, gaming and watch films. Really, these are not disc intensive tasks.

Here is a wikipeadia link:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RAID

As mentioned earlier in this thread: for optimum performance then hardware RAID is preferred. Software (driver) implementation is not bad, but might add some overhead. However there is no reason why your motherboard does not have a hardware RAID chip built into it, or there is not reason why it should have one.