Tech question about raids

[tony286]

My motherboard has built in raid, I want to add two drives to act as one for faster video editing. I heard raids make a big difference. Would I have to reformat c drive to do that ?

[Juicy D. Links]

wear a condom to prevent aids

[DrGuile]

Originally posted by juicylinks
wear a condom to prevent aids

What a fucking retard.


It all depends on what operating system you are using. But since your RAID is hardware, you just add the two disks, and set your BIOS correctly.

Thats should pretty much be it.

[Juicy D. Links]

Originally posted by DrGuile


What a fucking retard.


It all depends on what operating system you are using. But since your RAID is hardware, you just add the two disks, and set your BIOS correctly.

Thats should pretty much be it.

thank you

[Probono]

RAID
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives

RAID 0 two drives with all the data stripped accross both of them. This will require a format and reinstall and if either drive fails you are toast. It will be faster.

RAID 1 Mirrored drives, each drive is a mirror of the other, good for preventing data loss if a drive fails, slower writes, in theory faster reads.

skipping 3,4

RAID 5 3 or more drives one of which is a parity drive. Redundancy and usually increased speed. If you are going to use RAID this is the best option.

[Snake Doctor]

Damn I thought this thread was going to be about "raids" like what happened to the Sweets, where the cops bust in and take all your shit.

[Backov]

RAID 5 is NOT the best option.

It is a good one, a good compromise between reliability, speed and price.

RAID 0+1 is the BEST RAID. It is also the most expensive.

If you want full redundancy, AND the speed mirroring can offer you, this is the way to go.

[liquidmoe]

Dont bother if you are doing it with ATA/IDE drives. Anything near 100gigs or over will 95% fail in about 1-2 years and ATA/IDE just has horrible RAID hardware in general. You are better of getting Serial ATA because its just so much better or SCSI, and if you are doing a SCSI RAID, you will probably see better results by just using a faster harddrive, 15K+ RPM.

[Arty]

Originally posted by tony404
My motherboard has built in raid, I want to add two drives to act as one for faster video editing. I heard raids make a big difference. Would I have to reformat c drive to do that ?

Answer is no, you may keep your c: drive. Two disks on raid will be one logical drive with the total size of booth. Make sure drives are identical. Then you may format it just like another hdd.

[Arty]

Originally posted by liquidmoe
Dont bother if you are doing it with ATA/IDE drives. Anything near 100gigs or over will 95% fail in about 1-2 years and ATA/IDE just has horrible RAID hardware in general. You are better of getting Serial ATA because its just so much better or SCSI, and if you are doing a SCSI RAID, you will probably see better results by just using a faster harddrive, 15K+ RPM.

I'm not sure about that. All mechanical parts (plate, heads, etc.) are same for all three types of interfaces. SCSI was in the lead because it can queue commands and works better in high load work with many requests such as web servers. but for workstations I can't see any difference between three (for current generaion hdd's). Also many interfaces suffer from mechanical part of hdd's. Serial ata takes the lead when reading from on hdd cache. Other than that it's limited by hdd read speed from platters. It may perform better when 20k drives apperar. lol

But I think HDD's fail percentage wouldn't change depending it's interface..

[tony286]

Dont bother if you are doing it with ATA/IDE drives. Anything near 100gigs or over will 95% fail in about 1-2 years and ATA/IDE just has horrible RAID hardware in general. You are better of getting Serial ATA because its just so much better or SCSI, and if you are doing a SCSI RAID, you will probably see better results by just using a faster harddrive, 15K+ RPM.


So using ata/ide drives in a raid would I see a difference in my video rendering or am I wasting my time.

My system is a amd xp 2200 cpu, 1 gig ddr ram

Want to speed it up but dont want to spend the money on a new box yet. Any suggestions ?

[tony286]

bump

[Hooper]

SCSI was in the lead because it can queue commands and works better in high load work with many requests such as web servers. but for workstations I can't see any difference between three (for current generaion hdd's).

Queuing has nothing to do with it. The reason scsi is faster is because it doesnt rely on the bus. The bus is where the bottleneck on virtually any system is.. you have your processor, memory and a few other gadgets trying to use your bus.. .. suppose you do a bunch of reads and writes.. regardless of the speed of your bus, the processor has to execute multiple commands, memory has to do the same as well.. and now you add your hdd in and it increases latency... even in low load environments. plus consider that any system really is a high load environment because bandwidth usage hits in bursts (e.g. every time you open word your system is taxed in overtime).

Scsi is by far and away better for every application. It's just more expensive. Kinda like saying a 100k sports car isnt as good as your pinto.. your pinto might be cheaper and hold more mexicans, but i assure you my car will perform far better in any situation that relies on speed

ide drives have caught up in rpm's but as i'm now addressed, rpm's are such a minor issue really. kinda like processor speed, it's really over hyped and less tied to good performance that you would be lead to believe by *gasp* intel and amd.

tony. i assure you. get yourself a nice fat 80 gig 15k barracuda and your system will be twice as fast. you wont believe it.

that, or buy a mac

[liquidmoe]

Serial ATA also gives you hot plug and daisy chain like SCSI, but I would still prefer SCSI for RAID, but then again are you sure that the bottleneck for you are your harddrives and not something else on your system?

Personally I think if you are going to go through the hassle of setting/using a RAID you may as well not skimp on it and set it up proper with SCSI, otherwise whats the point?

[Phil21]

Sorry hooper..

You're outdated.

SCSI is great, and IMO more reliable (just better quality control, etc.), and of course more suited towards "enterprise" applications.

However, single drive UDMA/SATA is actually in almost all cases faster than single drive SCSI these days.

Not at random access, but at sustained write/reads such as video editing is. This is due entirely to the platter density of modern UDMA drives vs. SCSI. You don't get 60GB platters on SCSI drives.


For random access and such, SCSI is still king. That's also due in part to platter density (note high density generally hahahaha higher seek times), and of course your command queuing, and general higher RPM scsi drives (15k RPM).

In all cases I will put money on you putting whatever SCSI drive ina desktop system. and me putting whatever UDMA drive in, and I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference.

There is just no real reason except in high-end multi-disk arrays that I see to use SCSI these days. And I used to be a SCSI zealot, with it on my desktop, etc. For webservers and such, that don't have huge random access requirements we just do RAID 1 UDMA (granted, not shitty RAID like promise, etc.). I have yet to lose customer data, for over 3 years of doing this. SATA is making using SCSI for these types of applications even less appealing.

We do use SCSI in like our SQL servers, where we have use 8 cheetah x15.3's in RAID10. Nothing even comes close to touching SCSI for high-end multi-disk RAID systems. Period.

-Phil

[kmanrox]

raid is great if you have very important data/dbases

the only raids i've had that i dont like, are the SWAT brand of raids, they are very rude and intrusive and somewhat restrictive with what you can do...

[Hooper]

i disagree. while you might be telling the truth about platters ( dont keep up to date with that kinda stuff).. bottom line is that ide drives still rely on the bus. which will always slow you down.

you might be able to find an instance or two where lots of sequential low cpu cycle, low memory use reads or writes are somehow faster, but the average joe doesnt do that....

in the end, i can only speak from experience. build me a server, give me a scsi, i'll support thousands and thousands of simultaneous users..

build me the same server with an ide and it'll begin choking after 400-500 users.

why? cause hdd reads/writes are in line to be processed by the bus on ide systems, whereas with scsi systems the hdd read/write goes straight to the drive without waiting for the next cpu cycle to finish.

It's kinda a no brainer for those who dont understand what i'm talinga bout.

IDE = one door to the train, everybody wants to get on.. but they all go through the same door.

SCSI = one door for some people, another door for other people..

In the end all you care about is how fast you can get the train boarded imho. Price wise you cant beat ide though.. not saying ide is bad.. just saying it's slower than scsi.

[Phil21]

Hooper,

Again.. a few years a

[Phil21]

Hooper,

Again.. a few years ago you would have been 100% correct..

Now it's a lot more convoluted. The advent of UDMA (and SATA of course) kind of makes what you say a moot point.

You're not relying on system CPU much any more for access like you were before. You have direct access to the drives.

If you go even further and put an "abstraction" layer of a hardware IDE RAID card (such as 3ware), it even gets more convoluted.. You won't tell the difference.

In fact, the adaptec RAID we have in the DB server seems to eat more CPU than IDE disks do directly connected to a controller. Of course, the RAID array gets hit slightly harder ;)

I will stand by the argument that in most (not all) applications you would not be able to see much of a difference at all between IDE and SCSI. Definitely not the 60-70% performance drop you alluded to earlier.

However, this is like arguing over abortion/OS/apple or PC/etc. So to each his own.

-Phil

[Hooper]

hehe. true. well maybe i'm a dinosaur at 27...

i just know that our scsi boxes beat the shit out of our ide boxes every day repeatedly.

sounds like you know how to configure thosue ide boxes though. you should make a biz out of it