Will 3 raids slow down my computer?

[Moimit]

Hi guys,
I've got these drives which i want to run like this
2x Seagate 80g SataII drives (OS,raid 1)
2x Samsung 200g SataII drives (raid 0)
2x Seagate 400g SataI Drives (raid 0)

Would i be able to run a SataI and SataII raid on the same motherboard (GA-965P-S3) or would this slow all of my drives down or not even work at all. I don't think there is going to be much of a difference but i thought someone might know.

Also can you raid external Usb drives?(silly question i know) i've got 2x40g 7200rpm notebook drives.

 

[DelJo63]

Hi guys,
I've got these drives which i want to run like this
2x Seagate 80g SataII drives (OS,raid 1)
2x Samsung 200g SataII drives (raid 0)
2x Seagate 400g SataI Drives (raid 0)

Would i be able to run a SataI and SataII raid on the same motherboard (GA-965P-S3) or would this slow all of my drives down or not even work at all. I don't think there is going to be much of a difference but i thought someone might know.

Also can you raid external Usb drives?(silly question i know) i've got 2x40g 7200rpm notebook drives.

Well, you certainly would have a file-server of great capacity!!
You're concerns are germane, as the SATA drives would require a software
raid implementation and managing 3 raid filesystems would certainly have
some impact. Until you have significant and contiunued i/o requests
(ie heavy dbms usage, heavy ftp requests), the impact would be small.

So this begs the question, "why all the HD and why do you need raid?"

 

[Rick]

Also can you raid external Usb drives?(silly question i know) i've got 2x40g 7200rpm notebook drives.

Yes, but through software only. You can setup software RAID via disk manager (Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc).

Software RAID is a funny thing. Operations that would normally be done by the host controller will be faster because your CPU is much faster, but there will be more overhead on your CPU. How much? Not enough to to be a concern on recent computer, in my opinion. This is speculation though... Only one way to find out!

It would be irresponsible of me to not bring up how unsafe RAID 0 is though. You're increasing your chance of failure, reducing the chance of recovery from failure and getting little performance gain. On the other hand, you get to make use of all those disks which is good.

I'm curious about your choice of RAID 1 for the OS. Where someone such as myself doesn't care about the OS, I'd have it on RAID 0 for performance. But my data (which would be on the 200GB drives) would definitely be RAID 1 - especially since storage doesn't typically need increased performance. My data includes music, documents etc...

Of course I don't know what you're using it for, so the final decision is yours of course.

 

[DelJo63]

IMO, RAID should only be supported by a RAID hardware implementation such as
SCSI, as it operates autonomously and will complete each I/O independent of the CPU. What's the point of using RAID when you allow a frozen system to
interfere with the operation?

 

[Nodsu]

"RAID" controllers integrated on motherboards are really fakeraid - all the work is done by your system CPU. The more arrays you create, the slower your system will get.

Unless you are really on a budget, you should consider a true hardware SATA RAID adapter (cost some $200+).

 

[Moimit]

I like lan parties , I host one which pulls in about 30-60 people every month and it happens to be at my house. Mainly i've been recording/encoding high definition films on it while it isn't being used. This computer is only really used as a fileserver. I'm usually transfering about 100-200g here and there of all sorts of things. I just wanted to use my existing space as the towns Gigabit link is coming into action very soon (very cool btw) to be able to serve the files i've currently got. Roughly got about 1tb of stuff and its no use it just sitting there.

 

[Justin]

Hi guys,
I've got these drives which i want to run like this
2x Seagate 80g SataII drives (OS,raid 1)
2x Samsung 200g SataII drives (raid 0)
2x Seagate 400g SataI Drives (raid 0)

Would i be able to run a SataI and SataII raid on the same motherboard (GA-965P-S3) or would this slow all of my drives down or not even work at all. I don't think there is going to be much of a difference but i thought someone might know.

Also can you raid external Usb drives?(silly question i know) i've got 2x40g 7200rpm notebook drives.

The question I have, is why are you doing two stripes?

I can understand having a stripe on one set of drives, to install programs and games on, because the performance boost can be well worth it.

But I don't see having a need for 1.2 TB of stripe available.

Are you using one for programs/games, and another soley for video or audio processing, or perhaps video recording?

Just wondering.

 

[Moimit]

I use one for my games and music and the other for recording/conversion of movies.

 

[Blakhart]

Unless the individual files themselves are relatively huge, aid0 will be of little help. If you desire the most speed of transfer for video data, aid0 is your friend, but an unreliable one. I promise you you will have grief caused by aid0 software, especialy if you run multiple arrays in software on the same system. I feel that ide raid, which includes all sata, is a joke, and a cruel one at that. Me I would use the drives independantly and place a pagefile on each.

 

[Moimit]

The problem is that i'm currently using files 40g+ not much smaller. After i'm done encoding them i transfer them to another machine for permanent storage. It is just really slow doing anything with the drives, going to Raid 0 should be much faster and i don't need the data redundancy.

 

[DelJo63]

...going to Raid 0 should be much faster and i don't need the data redundancy.

Don't assume that 2x drives will 1/2 the time!!
A rule of thumb is
N-raid devices will reduce I/O time by approximately

(1/N * seek time)​

so your HD performance specs can easily have more impact than raid itself

I/O times are

1. seek time +
2. rotational delay +
3. data transfer time

for a set of identical HDs, rotaional delay and data transfer are fixed
and raid-0 reduces the impact of only seek time

 

[Moimit]

so will that give me an advantage moving around larger files and recording files to the drives?