RAID-0 Striping

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 17th August 2009, 05:22 AM

I have no idea Simon,,
like I said, its about combining TWO needs,,

I only know what I read on the 'net about increased performance,, some people say its considerable.

as for block size,, again there are lots of differing ideas, average file size, maximum file split,
ie, you could have a 4kb block size,, and on a 8000kb file it would maximise storage and the amount of splitting done, which when writing is fine,, but reading such a split file would take forever,,
[have I got that right?]
the black caviers cover FOUR important functions,,
they have a FIVE year warranty,, and are bloody quick for a normal drive. They are cheap! They are big enough.
I can do this and not lose either way,,,,

**Captain_Rightfoot** · 17th August 2009, 06:09 AM

Pedro, have a read [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID"]here[/ame].

By definition RAID 0 provides no redundancy. That's really not a good backup strategy. Doesn't windows have something that manages your backup onto an external HDD? Surely they have copied that from OS X by now? That would be a simple cheap and effective backup strategy.

Everyone should have a portable HDD with an image of all your important stuff off site.

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 17th August 2009, 02:31 PM

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

------------

I need to arrange a back-up for my PC

,,

so I thought I'd do both,,

purchase two 500GB WD caviar black HDD's
(5year warranty and speed. dont say raptor,,)

stripe them,,
and back-up to the 320gb I have now,,

the thought process is --

just copy the 320 across to the new array--
then re-format the 320 for back-up duties,,,,

I agree Captain!

**Aussie** · 17th August 2009, 03:04 PM

Raid 0 - Min 2xhdds Data is striped across both drives, If one fails you lose the lot. Read/write performace improved over standard single drive and Raid 1.

Raid 1-Min 2xhdds Data is Mirrored across each drive. Has excellent redundancy, if you lose one drive can still function on 2nd disk, also has the ability to rebuild new drive automatically. Downside - Loss of storage space by 50% e.g Buy 2x 1gig hdds and you will only have 1gig storage space available.

Raid 5 - Used for mainly on larger servers - Hot swap plug and play with one drive reserved as a parity drive.

There are also variations, can have Raid 1 + stiping etc requires more drives

**Bytemrk** · 17th August 2009, 06:55 PM

Pedro,

If you are primary looking at Raid 0 for speed... as someone else here pointed out are you sure its the HDD performance of your system that the games are really stretching?

Have you done any system performance monitoring to try and get an idea where your real bottle necks are?

If you are going to use Raid - as well as the drives the key to a fast raid system is a decent Raid controller. Many desktop main-board raid controllers are not that wonderful. I'd really be surprised if by using raid 0 with only 2 drives you will see any visible performance increase at all.

That said... those Black Caviars are damn good value - I put one in a friends system this weekend -good cheap, long warranty, he's happy

I'd start with some system monitoring.. determine for sure its the disk IO that you need to be focusing on. You may find more ram or faster ram gives you much better bang for your buck.
(Disclaimer: the previous statement is based on absolutely no knowledge of you system and should be ignored should any or part not apply

)

Mark

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 26th August 2009, 04:32 PM

UPDATE!

well its all working again,,

someone should have said something about "HDD PRIORITY",, oh, and that there are NO intel raid drivers,,
but something called a "raid Intel matrix manager"

just doing some final copying and then some formating.

then a benchmark or two---

if nothing else I now know how to set up a raid array,,

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