Some general questions about hardrives [Archive] - Aria Forums

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simonjanda

06-01-08, 16:45

PeterStoba

06-01-08, 17:18

1. SATA is faster
2. It depends what RAID config
3. There are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
4. As far as i know, no
5. 2 is faster

simonjanda

06-01-08, 17:31

Thanks for your reply.
I've been reading the info on the link you sent. Its still confusing.
Is there any advantage in having RAID (any) over just a single direct hardrive?
I was hoping to speed up my system.

Thanks again.
Simon

PeterStoba

06-01-08, 17:35

I've never tried it, or intend to, as far as i know it is just for backups i.e part 1 is on one HDD and 2 is on the second etc... which can be fatal if one dies

Jiggles

06-01-08, 17:53

RAIDs are good way to do things. you can have 2 or more hard drives with all the same information on them. if one of them dies then you can still run the computer and replace the broken one and it will "heal" its self. No down time :)

PeterStoba

06-01-08, 18:50

cleggypdc

06-01-08, 19:32

generally from my experience with RAID, the best performance in games comes from striping, but i wouldn't recommend this if you have ANY personal data on the hard drives. Get yourself 3 hard disks, stripe 2 and then put XP and your profile on the other, leaving the striped array for games.

Hosser

06-01-08, 19:35

At the moment I have Win XP pro on my 80gig IDE. I will shortly be buying Vista Home Premium. So I have a few questions about hardrives.

1: Is it better for speed and performance to run the OS from a SATA or IDE?
2: Does having 2 SATAs in RAID configuration increase the performance?
3: What RAID configurations are there and what do they do?
4: For RAID do both HDs have to be identical?
5: SATA 1 or SATA 2 - I presume 2 is faster than 1?

I would be grateful for any info on the above please.

1. SATA has a higher theoretical bandwidth, and are generally faster. However, merely saying SATA is faster is not true, since a SATA laptop drive may still be slower than a desktop PATA drive. Also remember that IDE stands for "Integrated Drive Electronics" and includes both SATA and PATA drives - this is one thing that really bugs me about shopping websites (including Aria) who list their PATA drives as IDE.

2. Depends which form of RAID you use. Striping increases performance at the cost of capacity and data security (disk failure = dead array).

3. Too many for me to list here. The only ones you should care about are striping and mirroring.

4. They have to be exactly the same capacity.

5. SATA 2 increases the bandwidth to 3Gbps, though you will likely not notice a difference in speed when running a SATA 2 disk at SATA /150 speed, since 150Mbps is more than a hard disk will ever use, in general everyday computing.

simonjanda

06-01-08, 19:42

alexnifty

06-01-08, 19:58

4. They have to be exactly the same capacity.

I thought you just got the capacity of the smallest disk of the pair?

simonjanda

06-01-08, 21:41

Hi
So if I have 2 SATA2 HD what RAID configuration do I need to improve performqance but keep a certain amount of safety in the system? As I read that RAID 0 (Striped) is good but offers no safety.

mac124

06-01-08, 21:43

if you want performance AND data security you will need a 0+1 raid array which will require 4 hard drives.

simonjanda

06-01-08, 21:47

Sounds expensive if I need 4 disks.
Is there any real advantage in setting up RAID with 4 drives as opposed to just having 1 normal drive?

mac124

06-01-08, 21:57

Uummmm you mean other than the performance increase of a striped raid array coupled with the data back up of a mirrored array?

Seriously unless its being used on a server of some kind being accessed by loads of users then a single hard drive will suffice for the vast majority of people, you may find games load a few seconds quicker or your pc boots a few seconds quicker but unless you are really really impatient it wont make any real difference.

maestro59

07-01-08, 08:49

Firstly, it's always best to have matching drives when setting up RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs) arrays (think of an array as a partition) - by matching I don't mean just the same size (say 40GB) but the same cache and seek times - so it's always best to go with the same manufacturer and model number - incase any of the aforementioned has been changed as that can introduce "odd" behaviour which will give you a headache down the line.

RAID 0 - Stripe, take two or more drives (upto the limit of the RAID controller) and make one large physical drive within the OS to the capacity of all drives together (ie 3x300GB drives = 900GB | 2x40GB drives = 80GB).
Benefits - as data is "striped" (written) across all drives at once both read and write times are decreased.
Drawbacks - if one drive fails you loose all data as it cannot be recreated from the surviving drives as part of it was on the dead drive.

RAID 1 - Mirror, as the name suggests - take a drive and make an exact copy of it, bit for bit, on another drive.
Benefits - complete redundancy of data if one drive fails everything is on the other drive.
Drawbacks - can be slow (RAID controller dependent), even slower than just having one drive.

RAID 2 - very rare now, even rare in the past - basically you needed a minimum of six discs and worked similar to RAID 3/4 but instead of using parity it used ECC - modern drives now have ECC rendering this superfluous and even still when it wasn't it was an expensive way of doing it

RAID 3/4 - Requires a minimum of three drives, one drive is reserved for parity (this is an equation that can recreate the data if any drive was to fail) and the remaining drives in the array get data striped across them at Byte level for RAID 3 and in Blocks for RAID 4. Using Blocks instead of Bytes increases the "speed" of RAID 4 over RAID 3.
Benefits - Speed and Redundancy at the cost of the size of one drive (ie 3x30GB drives = 60GB in the OS).
Drawbacks - Having a single drive for parity is still a bottleneck and in real life usage ends up being the drive to fail first as it's the most used.

RAID 5 - the daddy of RAID, like above uses a minimum of three drives but now the parity is also striped across all drives instead of reserved for one drive.
Benefits - Increased speed over RAID 3/4 with the same redundancy at the price of the size of a single drive.
Drawbacks - Price? Possibly - if you compare it to RAID 0 you have the same storage space in the OS but for the price of an extra drive - plus RAID 5 controllers are usually the most expensive. Alot of motherboards now have built in RAID controllers but don't support more than 0 and 1.

RAID 6 - Dual parity writes so can sustain the simultaneous failure of two drives, unlike the single drive failure of 1-5. This though requires a minimum of four drives and you loose the size of two from the os (eg; 4x40GB drives = 80GB in the OS | 5x40GB drives = 120GB in the OS).
Benefits - as mentioned, can sustain the failure of two drives
Drawbacks - more cost to cover a very unlikely scenario - having two drives fail at once is highly unlikely.

Then you can combine RAID sets to get others (called nested sets), such as RAID 1+0 (sometimes written RAID 10) - which is RAID 1 + RAID 0 a mirrored striped set or RAID 0+1, a striped mirrored set. RAID 5+1 a mirrored striped set with distributed parity and so on.

The nestled sets you probably won't need to deal with - and why go for something like RAID 1+0 when RAID 5 offers the same benefits at the cost of a drive less.

In addition to the RAID options above you can have "online spares" which is a HDD sat waiting to replace a failed drive. This is more handy if you have a couple of RAID arrays running off the same RAID controller as the spare can be shared amongst all the different arrays.

At the end of the day RAID isn't a backup. A virus which wipes drives will still loose your data, if the RAID controller card fails you will also stand a good chance of not being able to recover your data, although with no moving parts it's unlikely for this to happen - it still a possibility though. What I'm trying to say is although RAID can make you data a little safer from the failure of a HDD it's still good practice to have a nice backup (or two) on some physical media like a DVD.

Hosser

07-01-08, 10:53

Thankyou all for your comments.

In relation to the comments by 'cleggypdc' about having OS on different disk to programs,
I didnt think this would be possible.
What about the files from games that go into the windows directory?

Simon.

You mean the Program Files directory, surely? And you can change that very easily. For instance, all my games go onto a secondary disk (D:\Games). Whenever I install a game, I simply customise the installation path - all games allow you to do this.

I thought you just got the capacity of the smallest disk of the pair?

Er nope... Pretty sure they need to be identical for Striping and Mirroring. RAID-5 doesn't require identical disks, but they must have the same amount of free space on them.

coiler

07-01-08, 11:28

I had RAID 0 for performance, had one crash in a game and one of the drives became corrupt. As the data is spread accross two drives I lost EVERYTHING.

Unless you are going to run four drives and have x2 as a mirror to backup the data I really wouldn't reccomend raid. The performance % really isnt worth the cost or hassle.

simonjanda

07-01-08, 13:11

Ok. This info has been very useful. Just reading about RAID makes my head spin so that alone swings me towards just a 'normal' HD set up.
One last thing which will transfer data quiker a 10,000rpm SATA or a 7200rpm SATA2.
I know the SATA2 has a greater transfer rate but would the RPM of the other disk make up the difference?
I know that 10,000rpm HDs are expensive compared to similar capacity SATA2s.
What do you think?

Ta
Simon

PeterStoba

07-01-08, 14:15

I have used 10,000 and 7200 RPM drives, both SATA, there is about a 4 second difference, it's just impatience and showing off mainly, i see no point in not being able to wait for a few seconds...

coiler

07-01-08, 15:54

I have a 10,000 raptor and it flies. Game load times on my raptor XP setup are a LOT faster than my Sata2 7200 XP setup. The difference is worth the cost. and certainly a lot easier than RAID.

mac124

07-01-08, 17:04

I question whether the cost makes up for he minor performance increase, and i KNOW the noise increase isn't worth it from the amount of people who have ditched the raptors in favour of spinpoint setups or similar decent perfoming normal drives.

PeterStoba

07-01-08, 17:58

My spinpoint is silent near enough, all i hear are my fans which are covered by music

Aaron

07-01-08, 20:46

you have musical fans? ;)

PeterStoba

07-01-08, 21:14

Yes

simonjanda

11-01-08, 17:51

Ok

I have bought a new SATA 2 drive and connected it to my PC via the 2nd SATA connector on my MB. It is a Seagate Barracuda 250gig. I removed the jumper to set the drive to 3gbs, as opposed to 1.5.
In hardware properties and even in my BIOS it recognizes the drive but when I open My Computer it isnt displayed there. So I cannot access the drive, not even to fomat it.

Any suggestions please.

Thanks
Simon

mac124

12-01-08, 09:25

Because it is a brand new drive it needs to be initialised then formated. To do this you need to go into Control Panel > Administrative tools > Computer management > Disk Managemment.

This should list all the drives on your system, including the new one and you should be able to right click on the ne drive and format it.

simonjanda

13-01-08, 14:10

OK
New drive all up and running.
Thanks for all you help and advice.

Simon

simonjanda

13-01-08, 14:31

Hi again.
In the Computer Managment I can see all my drives.
Both my original drives (IDE 80g + SATA 300g) have the following info displayed:-
Layout = Partition
Type = Basic
Status = Healthy (System) for the IDE
Healthy (Active) for the SATA
But the new SATA2 drive displays the following:-
Layout = Simple
Type = Dynamic
Status = Healthy - nothing added.

Is this all OK?

Thanks