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RAID RAID Go Away!
Niceguy Myeye
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, here is the history and situation.
I generally play games. That's pretty much all I do with my computer other than general web stuff. The current computer I have, I started with one 75 GB raptor in 11/06. In May of this year, I bought a second one and put it into a RAID 0 configuration. This is mainly because, I prefer to skip the most boring part of any game: The loading screens, but also because I wanted to have a little more space.
Well, this weekend, the first drive I bought ended up dead. It was so bad that the motherboard didn't recognize it at all. Not only that, but also, it had the telltale scrape, then click sound that I have only previously heard by accidentally dropping an external HDD. I haven't moved my computer since installing the second drive (May), so unless my cat figured out how to lift and drop my computer, then put it back in place, I doubt that's what happened.
Currently, I'm up and running on the second drive only, and plan on getting the first one replaced under the 5 year warranty, but haven't gone through the process yet.
So, now that's all out of the way, here are my concerns:
Over the course of having the RAID 0 setup, my computer didn't seem as stable. In the recent past, it would tend to crash on loading screen and other random crashes including brief blue screens which were too fast for me to read. At first, I thought that maybe I had some bad RAM, but I ran Memtest and everything seemed OK. Now I've heard that RAID 0 isn't the most stable, thing, but here's where I want your opinions:
1. How stable have you generally found your RAID0 configurations to be?
2. After the warranty, is it really worth it to reformat into the RAID0 and start all over again?
Keep in mind, while I did like generally faster loading times, I was sort of disheartened by the crashes. How much of it do you think is because of a failing HDD and how much of it is inherent to the RAID0 configuration?
Thanks in advance!
Edit: Never mind, I found the answer I was looking for in that locked pc build thread.. And it did seem to match my current experience, which is that it's not worth the stability hit.
I generally play games. That's pretty much all I do with my computer other than general web stuff. The current computer I have, I started with one 75 GB raptor in 11/06. In May of this year, I bought a second one and put it into a RAID 0 configuration. This is mainly because, I prefer to skip the most boring part of any game: The loading screens, but also because I wanted to have a little more space.
Well, this weekend, the first drive I bought ended up dead. It was so bad that the motherboard didn't recognize it at all. Not only that, but also, it had the telltale scrape, then click sound that I have only previously heard by accidentally dropping an external HDD. I haven't moved my computer since installing the second drive (May), so unless my cat figured out how to lift and drop my computer, then put it back in place, I doubt that's what happened.
Currently, I'm up and running on the second drive only, and plan on getting the first one replaced under the 5 year warranty, but haven't gone through the process yet.
So, now that's all out of the way, here are my concerns:
Over the course of having the RAID 0 setup, my computer didn't seem as stable. In the recent past, it would tend to crash on loading screen and other random crashes including brief blue screens which were too fast for me to read. At first, I thought that maybe I had some bad RAM, but I ran Memtest and everything seemed OK. Now I've heard that RAID 0 isn't the most stable, thing, but here's where I want your opinions:
1. How stable have you generally found your RAID0 configurations to be?
2. After the warranty, is it really worth it to reformat into the RAID0 and start all over again?
Keep in mind, while I did like generally faster loading times, I was sort of disheartened by the crashes. How much of it do you think is because of a failing HDD and how much of it is inherent to the RAID0 configuration?
Thanks in advance!
Edit: Never mind, I found the answer I was looking for in that locked pc build thread.. And it did seem to match my current experience, which is that it's not worth the stability hit.
Niceguy Myeye on
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Posts
If you want performance and reliability whilst still using RAID then go with two business drives in RAID-1. Any performance increase you may see by using Raptors is offset by their totally shitty reliability.
For example a couple of these in RAID-1 will not only give you great performance but also reliability and fail over with RAID-1. Plus a respectable amount of storage capacity.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Seriously. If you want a backup solution, use individual drives and rsync.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
From what I can tell (especially since he was using RAID-0 which has zero redundancy, hence no backup) he was using RAID for performance reasons.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
For the most part, given smart controller technology, hard drives generally work or just outright break. When they break, that's the worst thing ever, and (as mentioned previously and as you know of course) RAID 0 doubles the chances of this.
I really like RAID-1. It seems like a big investment in 'wasted' overhead on storage, but in my experience adding storage is always easy, while increasing performance and reliability... isn't.
I have a 4-drive RAID 0+1 array in my main PC and it works fine. HDs are practically free nowadays so it was a no brainer for me when I built my last PC (why not?).
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Its about a $1 per a GB but eh. Thats what you have to pay for performance.
And if you wanted performance and reliability you'd go SCSI rather than SATA.
I'd just like to add here, if you want high performance drives then go SCSI. Raptors are unreliable, any performance they may have over other SATA 7200 rpm drives is offset by their horrendous reliability.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I run scsi and I love it but I can't afford a 300gb 10K RPM scsi drive. Believe me I looked.
Seriously, don't bother with raptor drives. Their reliability sucks. Get a couple of business class sata drives with 32mb of cache and put them in RAID-1. (Seagate have yet to fail me)
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
http://lwn.net/Articles/237924/
I expect people here might find that interesting.
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/
This too, though it's a shame google doesn't seem to want to spit out specific vendor information. If you like graphs, look at that second one.
That said, if you're after performance, you're definitely not going to see a marginal difference with SATA RAID, you need to go SCSI. Even then, you're likely to not see too much, if any, from a PC standpoint.
I know it's overkill but I have 4x320GB Seagate drives in RAID 5 so I have nearly a 1TB available. One of those drives fail? no problem, the array survives, though at diminished performance.
Granted it's not exactly silent computing, but neither is it loud either.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
I've currently got three hard drives in my pc, two in RAID-1 and a third as a general dump anything onto it drive. I think for heat reasons and sound reasons I'll keep it at that.
Also, if you want to have a nice cry this is a RAID-6 fileserver I built for work.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
On that subject, I have yet to see anyone make a scsi controller card as good as adaptec. It seems like all the new stuff is SAS now though. I think I saw a motherboard with SAS which would be really nice.
http://www.dvhardware.net/article29214.html
Asus P6T deluxe. I'm certain its going to be a 250-350$ motherboard.
*edit*
Seems like its shipping with a little screen to help OC. So more like 350-450$. Good lord its going to be expensive.
Considering how the only good implementation of ZFS is on Solaris, no.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Adaptec makes the best fucking RAID cards.