Choices...

B

Ben

Site Developer
I would be led to believe that the RAID would be much faster than just 1 SSD, but I've been wrong before.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Two Raptors in RAID should provide better write speeds, but it won't help on the access latency which is what makes the SSD such a noticeable upgrade. And against a Vertex or X25-M, the read speeds are still going to favor the SSD as well.

Personally I am done with RAID, especially Intel's Matrix RAID which has almost no failsafes or array protection. It will never warn you it is writing corrupt data right up until the point it no longer recognizes your RAID array... leaving you hosed.

I'd suggest the 60GB or 120GB Vertex, or the X25-M. The X25-M is a better drive, but it does cost a hefty bit more recent price cut or not.
 
On_Wisconsin

On_Wisconsin

Coastermaker
Good point about Intel's Matrix RAID. Although none of the traditional HDs that have died on me have given me warnings either*.

Thanks guys for your input, I will give an update once a decision is made




*My first HD was a WD Caviar for my computer...DOA. I bought a WD external to backup everything on the old computer...died in a few months. Now this, which is a Seagate that lasted about a year before getting the same error (0x0F4) as the first HD

This is funny considering our old computer from 2001 has a Maxtor that still runs...but, I did not buy it, so it will last forever
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
With RAID, if the HDD dies then you are protected (with the obvious exception of RAID 0). That wasn't what I was referring to... With ANY kind of overclock no matter how mild bad data was being written to the array. I tested it out on two different Gigabyte motherboards... I have no idea if that means it is an issue with ICH9R southbridges or an issue with my Seagate drives. Even at stock I would find bad file data just not nearly as much or as frequently occuring, so perhaps it is a Seagate issue.

I was never aware of any problem right up until I randomly rebooted and the motherboard informed me the array had failed and two of the drives did not have a RAID filesystem on them. It was a RAID 10 system. Further testing and I was able to reproduce it with a two drive RAID 0 array. Regardless, after the first lost array I was running the Intel Matrix drive verification utility almost daily (4-5 hour runs) to find and fix these errors and prevent a recurrence... I'd find more than 100 a week just with a 333FSB.

The software lacks any sort of intelligence or preventative ability... the only thing it will do is randomly start up a verification scan and repair if one to many issues occur. For example if you run a data verficiation check, it will spend five hours checking, give you the results, and all you can do is click okay. You are not given a choice to fix all the detected errors. In order to fix them you must run the fix & recover verfication scan... which takes another 5 hours with mostly idle disks. Even my QNAP NAS has more disk and RAID tools onboard than Intel's poor excuse of a software RAID. I guess I'm ranting now, sorry. But I lost some good data in that RAID 10 array that I thought was safe...
 
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Merlin

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
My opinion, forget raid. If you have files that are that important, burn them to CD, DVD or BD
You could always have a multiple hard drive failure.
And without raid, you have extra space
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
To costly to burn 100-200MB's of data to DVDs, not to mention I don't want the hassle of storing them. It's cheaper to just buy another drive. $35 for 200 DVDs or $65 for 750GB drive that's rewritable and takes up considerably less space? It's why I have a NAS with internal RAID now.
 
On_Wisconsin

On_Wisconsin

Coastermaker
I would probably be only doing RAID just to maximize performance. I can simply backup things the traditional way as I've always done. I think you guys are overcomplicating things here :p
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
If the only thing you want is performance, then RAID a pair of the vertex drives.

Just keep in mind if you use RAID your boots will include a 5-10 second delay waiting for Intel's RAID controller to scan the drives for RAID volumes and initialize them every reboot. A discrete card, even the top of the line models, can take up to 15 seconds to initialize and run checks.
 
B

Ben

Site Developer
Kougar said:
If the only thing you want is performance, then RAID a pair of the vertex drives.

Just keep in mind if you use RAID your boots will include a 5-10 second delay waiting for Intel's RAID controller to scan the drives for RAID volumes and initialize them every reboot. A discrete card, even the top of the line models, can take up to 15 seconds to initialize and run checks.
Click to expand...

Ah this explains the mysterious boot delay's I've noticed. I've always figured it to be a poor BIOS implementation or something, but this would certainly explain it. I'm running an Intel RAID 0 with 2 drives (+1 data non-RAID) and there is a noticeable delay before the Vista logo (or I guess progress bar heh) shows.
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Kougar... man. You've really turned me off of RAID, to say the least. It seems like everyone I know who has dealt with RAID has been unhappy in the end, and it seems like the benefits are far overshadowed by the drawbacks. Things are improved if you keep constant backups of things, but to reboot and the RAID array gone... not how you want to spend an evening.

On_Wisconsin: Personally for performance, I'd go with a single fast SSD, because it will offer a far better read speed than any mechanical RAID array. The write suffers, but not unless you RAID two of them together. Just be sure to keep constant backups of your personal data... that goes for any configuration really. I keep three copies of all my personal files, two copies on different drives on my PC and then another on the NAS. It's not worth taking chances.
 
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