I think raid has alot to do with the type of system you run. I've seen benchmarks showing that Raid increasing system performance by 50% and other benchmarks where, like was said before, the raid array actually slowed down the hard drives.

If you don't have the money, then I personally would not save up the money and buy another hard drive. Personally I haven't noticed too big of an increase in performance from my raid array, but I believe I haven't optimized it yet, so I plan to get on that soon.

Whenever I do get around to doing that, I'll run some benchmarks and post my results to give you a better indication of raid performance at least in my system.

Also, when I reformat and rebuilt my raid array I plan on posting an indepth article on what I did and how I went about it, and ask others to explain their procedure also, so hopefully that will help some. I'll try to do this by next week hopefully!

COOL! Hope to see ur review soon! By then i will decide to buy the extra hdd or may be change my vga or may be my casing! Very itchy hand to change someting! Haha! (May be there is this call iitchy hand sydrome for pc next time)! Cheers!

Just found this article that does a good comparison of Raid 0 with 2 drives vs. Raid 0 with 4 drives and vs. a single drive.

I caught some heat over this a while back and just wanted to show you guys where my justification for Raid speeding up a system by 20-50 percent comes from. It is only in certain areas and really not too noticeable for real-life usage. Still, this article does a good job comparing the setups and giving detailed benchmarks, and is worth a look.

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pro...nation_of_raid

There is a good articles on RAID at these websites -

Tom's Hardware -

IDE Training Course, Part 1: A Detailed Look at the Basics...
http://www17.tomshardware.com/storag...806/index.html

IDE Training Course, Part 2: Performance and Data Security with RAID -

http://www17.tomshardware.com/storag...813/index.html


IDE Training Course, Part 3: Using RAID -

http://www.tomshardware.com/newslett...2/33/raid.html

Other sites -

http://www.itp-journals.com/search/t0914.htm

http://www.pcnetworkadvisor.com/

If you want to read other articles on the subject, or tutorials on how to set up a RAID system, enter the word "RAID" with the quotation marks in a search engine such as http://www.google.com/.

Eric,

http://www.legge40.freeserve.co.uk/BuyerBeware.htm

Is RAID01 same as RAID10?

Probably Mict. Seems like it.

May be different though, like switching around the drive responsibilities in RAID10 or something.

Mic I think its either raid 0+1 (0/1) or just raid 10. Reference Mic's explanation of raid 0/5 or 50. Semantics.

After reading Phantasm's above post I called Falcon Northwest. They configured a machine for benchmark tests and sent it to Computer Gaming World Magazine. The rig was the P4 Canterwood w/ raid 10 (0+1). Raid 0 was set up with the two smallish 36Gig 10,000rpm wetern digital drives and a third 120Gig (raid 1 array) HD for storage.

Awesome rig. You can read all about it in this months issue.

I think I'll quickly add my support for RAID on servers.
theory in action:

DELL PowerEdge 1400
2@ 18GB SCSI RAID1 (mirror) w/ 2 partitons (both mirrored)
Server acting as Primary Domain Controler, File Server, etc.

about a year ago, our DELL NT server completely crashed and I was up most of the evening with support, trying to get the thing back up w/o re-installing or complete restore from backup tape.
After all the DELL hardware checks were clean, and it appeared to be a problem with the NT OS, I finally thought to try and startup on the 2nd disc (mirrored drive).
It came up great & I was able to verify that the mirror was 'current', and then I justed re-mirrored the now idle drive to the now-active drive (which used to be the mirror).
I've since read some things that mirroring your OS drive isn't a great practice, but it sure worked for me.
-C

I am confused by one of the aspects of setting up RAID 1. I have a PC-DL Deluxe motherboard from ASUS. It has a built-in Promise controller with 2 SATA and 1 ATA connectors for that controller.

The manual for the board is not clear on how many drives need to be connected where. Here is the quote:

"Connect the HDD cables. These connection options are available for creating a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array:

a) Connect two Parallel ATA HDDs to PRI_RAID connector and one Serial ATA HDD to either one of the two Serial ATA connectors, using separate parallel ATA or serial ATA cables.

b) Connect one Serial ATA HDD to each Serial ATA connector, using separate serial ATA cables."


Option a) seems to imply a connection of 3 drives, which does not make any sense.

Can I connect two hard drives to the ATA (PRI_RAID) connector (master and slave) and set it up as RAID 1?

Depends on motherboard's RAID options, naturally. Performance would be better if you used separate controllers though. RAID 1 uses two drives, not three, so I have no idea what Asus is talking about..

Each extra IDE channel (raid0 raid1) can handle two IDE devices, hard drives, cr-rom etc. If your not using them set up as raid you can put what ever you like on them. If you do use raid then you have to put your drives in a set pattern. One drive as Pri on one raid channel and the other as Pri on the other raid channel for say raid 0. You can then put your cd-rom and any extra had drives on you regular IDE channels. That's the way I see it.

I just ordered a PCI raid controller from Tiger direct. It's ata133 and so are my two 80 gig Maxtor's. Right now I have them running on my ATA100 mobo controller. I'll run HDtach before and after and post the results after Christmas. My plan is to use Raid 0 for the extra speed.
Here's some info I found too add to the mix
Raid level

OK my raid 0 is up and running.
I have two identical Maxtor 80 gig 7200 rpm drives 2m cache.
Before raid HDTach showed this for speed
Random access time was 14.2 ms
Read Burst speed 36 megabytes per sec,
Read speed max 61744 kilobytes per sec, min 3457 kilobytes per second
Average was 473443 kilobytes per second. CPU utilization was 11.7. My second drive was almost the same.
with raid 0
Random access time was 14.4 ms
Read Burst speed 36 megabytes per sec,
Read speed max 59705 kilobytes per sec, min 52120 kilobytes per second
Average was 42756 kilobytes per second. CPU utilization was 14.6
What I noticed running HDtach is as the hard-drive position moved to-wards the higher values the read speed dropped for non raid, but remained the same for the raid 0. The read speed was the same anywhere on the drive(s). I don't know if it factors into it but in both cases the drives were partitioned into 4 partitions. I don't know why the average is so low with Raid?
Maybe HDTach wasn't a good choice to bench mark.

I set up RAID0 with 2 120GB Western Digital Special Editions (7200RPM, 8MB cache) yesterday.

HDTach said:
Random Access Time - 13.1ms
Read Burst Speed - 74.2mbps
Read speed max - 65129kps
Read speed min - 25198kps
Avg. - 59245kps

But still, my single 74GB Raptor (10,000RPM, 8MB cache, SATA) spanked it. Raptor HDTach is here.

Not what I expected, but it's still incredibly fast anyway.

Hmm ... always wanted to know a liitle more about RAID ...Never really bothered me in the past ... you guys have anwered a few questions....

A Good flat in Stockton on Tees went for £12,000 recently...Heh!

Its a great upgrade to your machine to get RAID, particularly if you are into video capture or demand high grade disk performance or are just completely geeky like me.

Just start with a 2 disk RAID 0 stripe. This means that you combine the disk space into one volume and double its speed. The total size of the array is the size of the smallest disk times 2.

Of course, if one disk fails, then you loose everything, so therefore your chances of loosing all data has just increased by 100 per cent.


You can also build mirrors which make an automatic copy of one hard drive onto another. You loose 50% of space but now your chances of loosing everything have greatly diminished.

The total size of the array is the size of the smallest disk times 2.

You get the picture.

Lots of the more kick *** motherboards even available in high street stores have RAID controllers built onto them, but you can just get a RAID controller card as well, which is just a regular PCI card.

Its nice to use disks of the same model and make as well, if possible.

You won't get double your speed by using RAID 0, it's more like a 20-50% increase.

Well, to be honest, its hard to say exactly what it is. I just wanted to illustrate the concept. Its certainly a hell of a lot better, but it that way.

Well guys, I've always worked with RAID arrays at work but never really thought that I would (could afford) want one at home since SCSI disks are too expensive and IDE's just don't give you that much performance

until...

Western Digital released their new hot RAPTOR line of drives running at 10.000 rpm, SATA 150. (No, I don't work for WD, not even close). I searched the internet about these drives and only found positive responses, the first drive was a 36 gb., which just isn't big enough for today's standards.

Anyhow, I ordered 2 of the big brothers (74 GB) and now have them in a RAID - 2 x 74 = 148 (in reality only 168 GB). They are just nice nice nice nice, I want to explain one thing here, your performance improvement in a RAID yeah, could be something between 20% to 50%... but if you get a Raptor, bear with me, and set it up as your system drive, Windows loads faster, all your programs load faster because of the improved access time, I do some heavy programming and compiling and also play games, and can really feel the difference in anything I do.

Burn me for what I write if you please but before, go and read about these drives. (Ahh ok, they cost a little more per GB, but who needs 250 Gb space? anyways, if you do, set the Raptors as your System drive and install all your heavy applications, games etc. there, and use an inexpensive 250 Gb for your files, porns, etc.)

Cheers boyz