ASUS G50vt-A2 hard disk Raid 0 or not

HI everyone! After reading all the reviews from this website, I decided to pick the ASUS G50VT-A2, YAY for me! My laptop will arrive this wednesday or Thursday. I am gamer who loves to play WoW, C & C 3, Red Alert 3 and of course the upcoming Starcraft2... drooling to death. Anyways my questions are:
1. Should I do RAID 0 for my laptop? Is it worth it?
2. How is the vista 64 bit? can I install all games with that 64 bit? (including old games)

By the way, my use of this laptop will be for gaming, movies and songs. My friend told me just to do RAID 0 and if I need more space in the future, just buy an external HD.

Please give me the pros and cons, and tell me your opinion(either raid it or not).

Thank you.

 

RAID 0 = bad idea on a laptop. If you lose 1 drive you lose everything. Trust me, this isn't a fun situation.

 

You won't find a huge increase in gaming performance with RAID0, but loading times will be shorter (same with any other programs you open). The disadvantages is if one hard drive fails, both will not work and you'll have to reinstall your OS and risk loosing all your data (shouldn't be a problem if you back up your data on a regular basis). Another downside to RAID0 is you loose the ExpressGate feature. This was the case in the G50V, so I'm assuming the G50Vt will be similar.

 

Yes you do loose the express gate feature because as of now after I setup Raid 0 the express gate does not work but I have not done no research as of yet of re-installing it. I will post more info once I research it. Now Vista 64 will load much faster in a raid 0 then a standalone, I did not do some test on mine but I can tell. On another note, yes if you loose one drive you loose all data, but in my own expirience, I have never had a raid fail on me. Another thing you should note, on a raid, the hard drives work less then if all the data was stored on one. So if you going with the assumption if one drive fails you loose all, well your chances are higher with your main drive failing because your hard drive is working twice as hard. Games will load faster and you will just notice a difference when you go back to a non-raid system.

Now gaming in Vista 64 is great in my opinion, I can run Warcraft 3 and all of the games you mention run without glitch. Now they are some OLD games that wont run but you can always use dosbox for them. So in all its your decision how you want to setup your rig, and we are here to give you our opinions.

 

Well it seems that everyone here do not really promote raid 0 for gaming because it only effects the loading time. I actually like that joelmex about "Vista 64 will load much faster in a raid 0 then a standalone".
Game loading is not really much of a concern for me because I don't really play hard core games like crysis or fallout 3. I do not mind losing the express gate if windows load up faster than usual.
Anyways, I want everyone to take a vote on this matter (please please please). Yes to raid 0 or No to raid 0. Hopefully I will make up my mind when my laptop arrives on Wednesday. After you guys take the vote of course.
Thank you everyone.

 

Well I have mine in a raid 0. It is not 2x as fast just because you have two drives but it is faster.

Its a toss up really... You get a little speed but higher risk in data loss.

As others said, if you have backups than its not a big deal other than some time wasted reloading if a failure.

 

Why not do RAID 1? You get the capacity of 1 harddrive, but in return, you get the increased performance, and you get a backup of your drive that syncs constantly.

 

Raid 1 does not provide any extra performance.

Its actually a tad worse than just a single drive because their is very very slight overhead.

A raid 1 is a mirror... It is just any data written to disk 1 is also written to disk 2. But it does not access files off both drives. Only drive 1 is looked at. than if a failure happens it will use disk 2 and disk1 would go offline.

The way I look at it is either do raid 0 but have higher risk of data loss if hardware failure or do no raid and have the two drives seperate. You get all the space and just backup disk 2 to disk 1 and disk 1 to disk 2 on occasion and if any one fails the other will have your data, but while both are working you can for example have your page file on disk 2 and windows on disk 1 and this will help speed a tad. You can also install programs themselves on disk 2 and windows on disk 1 and it will help load/access times on things as well as it can read from both disks at the same time for diffrent things.

Hope this helps.

 

Mine = Raid 0 and a ghost every once in a while

 

lol, run not raid and ghost your system to the second drive every now and again, that way if one drive fails you can just switch boot priority and go on like nothing happened.

 

I'm another person with RAID 0... on my G50V-A2, I will say that RAID 0 is what pushed me over the edge for the purchase.

However, for full disclosure lol, I had four raptors in RAID 0 on my last desktop, so I do have a bias towards striping.

 

That's why I changed the Dell M4400 I had and I will update my sing soon
Raid on a laptop love it Just ghost on an external drive once a week and in 20 minutes if a drive craps out you are back in buisness.

 

I'm thinking about RAID 0...any idea how much of a battery life hit I will take?

 

That's a real tough one to gauge, it shouldn't really impact your battery life too much unless you're adding a second hard disk for RAID. My G50V-A2 had two disks already so there is minimal power loss. The disks are still spinning whether you're using them or not and that is the biggest factor.

 

Yes, I would be adding a second HDD to the X2. There must be specs out there on how much power a HDD will draw, right?

 

In that case, you should be able to find a spec sheet with the power consumption listed for the drive(s) you want to buy. For example in my G50V I have two Seagate 7200.3 Momentus drives which have the power specs in this datasheet:

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_7200_3.pdf#page=2

 

I'm guessing the X2 will also use the same drives, so I would add another 320GB drive. From Vicious' G50V review, the notebook uses 27W on power save internet surfing, so let's say the drive uses 1.5W on this mode in a reasonable worst case scenario (sort of halfway between idle and read/write or seek). So that means that adding another HDD would result in a 28.5W power draw, so that would be about a 5% decrease in battery life. Oh, if I made a calculation error, please correct me, there's a reason why I didn't major in math.

Of course this makes the assumption that enabling RAID doesn't draw much power, but I thought someone posted a reply from Asus saying that RAID was not enabled on the G50V(t) by default due to battery life.

 

Would Asus ship the extra HDD bracket to Canada though? That is, I assume that's what you mean by "the true north".

 

Ah, a fellow Canuck (I'm in Vancouver). Not sure if they will ship it up here, but I am getting the notebook, and presumably the bracket, shipped to my sister in the States when I go down around Christmas.

 

I see... I'm also going down to get one this Christmas, hopefully. But I'll just be getting an X1 I believe, since I have no relatives down there, and I'm hoping X1 will go on sale around Christmas...

 

Good speed from HDtune in raid 0 from 155 down to 55 over 640GB make's it a verry fast setup even for a desktop. I will test with 2 SSD to night. Just 2 patriot MLC 64GB.

 

hi, i have a question... with hd tune i got around avg: 145mb/s for the 80gb partition adn 120mb/s for the 510 gb partition.. however the burst rate was much smaller for both.. 70mb/s adn 60mb/s... this is somewhat odd and i was wondering if you can let me know what was ur burst rate...

this guy had a much higher score for a smaller partition:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=326862

another thing.. i talked to asus support and more than once they told me that raid 0 (striping) doesnot increase performance.. and one of them said that there was about 1-2% increase in performance on some benchmarks they did.... two of them said the only benefit was to have a much larger disk space which can be gained by raid 0... and both of them said that partitioning the drives or creating two volumes would negate the advantages of striping..

I have personally noticed the diff but did not do any benchmarks before striping so if anyone did any tests for non raid drives on this laptop so we can compare the difference betweenthe two.
I have the G50vt-a2 by the way but there shold not be any diff.

thanks.

 

What's your stripe length? I have 64KB stripes and I avg ~75MB/s burst on XP Pro SP3 with two Seagate 7200.3 320GB drives in a 536GB partition for Windows.

I'm dumbfounded as to how it's so high for the poster you link to -- it must be because of Server 2003 and the small first partition size (16GB)?

 

I'm planning to do exactly that in a week or so. I just finished copying off the hidden recovery partition. I need to finish a few game benchmarks (getting sidetracked with AITD), and then the next step is for me to backup my data, then factory restore to test non-raid with hdtach.

 

I think the link that I gave is mostly for the hard drive size.. as I also got a big difference for the larger partition (being slower avg ~120 MB/s).. so next time I am def. making the OS partition around 30gb...
the OS might have a little to do with it as it is a server OS which can mean that it has HD optimized access.

I have XP SP3

I remember that the HD rating on vista was 5.8 for non raid and 5.9 for raid.. but that really doesnt mean anything except that there is an improvement.

the stripe size that i used with hd tune is the default.. however i didnt see MUCH diff with other stripe sizes.. except with very small size like 512 bytes which was really slow... is there an ideal stripe size? maybe depending on usage....?

so can someone explain how can the burst rate be smaller than the avg rate..? or i guess i done understand what each means?
because sending data from the cache must be faster than retreiving data from the disk and putting it into the cache and then sending it from cache....?????

I am getting an error when the laptop is loading up.. at the press CTRL-I page on bootup i get error occured (0,1) on one of the drives, asus support told me to install raid on the entire partition instead since that can be the problem.. so (according to them) its not an actual problem but just howthe system and the raid thing is setup.. i highly doubt it but i will do some benchmarks on the entire drive and post here..

 

My first post ever on this forum was due to this problem (it's a bug) -- it happens for me when I have eSATA plugged in when I POST. After unplugging eSATA, a few cold boots and a warm boot usually fix it (and sometimes taking the battery out). Hopefully that works for you too.

 

ALLurGroceries.. whats a cold boot and a warm boot... i basically used start shut down and then started the laptop and sometime later before it hits windows i turned it off... i did that a few times, then i turned it on adn did a few ctrl alt deletes... and the problem is still there.. i even took out the battery....


and is eSata an external hard drive? cause i dont have anything connected to the laptop..

and i installed the seatools for the seagate hard drives... all tests failed.. on this laptop and also on the one that i returned due to problems. so does seatools fail for raid configurations or is it just me?

 

Are you able to boot at all into your OS?

A cold boot is when you turn your computer on after it's been off, a warm boot is basically a reboot.

eSATA is the external. If you don't have one it's not the same thing I mentioned. Your RAID array might just be fried. It's happened to me once before for reasons unknown to me on the G50V. I had to reinstall from scratch and recreate my array. So I hope it's not that.

I don't know about the seatools and RAID, but it probably is incompatible with the RAID controller so prone to fail the tests anyway. I don't have experience with it though, so I don't know really.

Edit: Is it saying NOT PRESENT for one of your disks, or FAILED?

If it's FAILED then you probably have to recreate the array and your data is kaput. This happened to me once before as I mentioned. It hurts

The not present part is usually able to be fixed with upwards of 10 boot tries. For me at least. One of your disks might have died, but that'd be a bit unlikely.

 

I have installed vista 64 non raid and attached are the hd tune benchmarks.

on bootup if you click tab at the begining... you will get a "page" where you can enter the raid setup by pressing control I, on that page at the bottom it would tell you the physical disks taht are there... and on teh second one it would say error occured(0,1), and 0,1 are my volumes.

i am now installing vista 64 on one volume as asus support told me before... but i talked to them again today and they said that they dont support raid and that if an error occured due to raid its not warranted...

 

chrous25 have you got any results on benchmarks for your 2 x SSD drives in Raid 0?

i am eagerly awaiting the arival of my asus g50vt-a1 and am going to stick 2 x OCZ v2 drives in it. hit me with uber benchmarks if possible

 

I have two ST9250421AS 250GB 7200RPM in RAID0 on my G50VT.



Pretty darn fast. Totally worth it IMO as long as you make backups.

 

What is the optimal stripe size? I've more or less finished my non-RAID benchmarks apart from battery life, so I might be doing RAID 0 this weekend.

 

good luck man

 

I just did 64kb, the default is 128 though.

 

Aack. I just did RAID0 and spent 2 hours (not sure why it took so long) copying over the recovery partition, but it didn't boot, probably because the partition copy program can't handle RAID drives. I'm reinstalling off the DVDs and am going to try another program from within Vista that is supposed to support RAID.

BTW, I found this article on RAID stripe sizes:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?p=318183#post318183

Sounds like if the default cluster size is 4k, then the stripe size should be 2k? But I set mine to 32k since I'm aiming to preserve some amount of battery life too. We'll see....I'm gonna do some battery benchmarks.

 

Here's an update:
Got it reinstalled from the DVDs okay, did the whole partition moving business, and got it to boot from the recovery partition with F9. Seemed to work just fine, the restore seemed to go just as before without RAID. Upon restarting, it keeps hitting a BSOD, which is after loading crcdisk.sys. Did the restore process again in case something screwed up, but same issue. From what I have found it, it is probably because the RAID driver is not installed from the factory, so Vista chokes. So I'm back to the DVD route, which isn't so great because it reduces the trustworthiness of my benchmarks, as the setups may have different files and drivers.:cry:

Any suggestions/tricks on how to slipstream a RAID driver into the recovery partition?

 

Okay, I finally completed my RAID0 vs non-RAID benchmarks. A little preamble on methods used, for those who are also scientifically minded:
Both versions involved a complete reinstall of Vista, using the recovery partition for non-RAID and the DVDs for RAID (see above posts). Both setups used a 4k cluster size and the RAID setup used a 32k stripe size. For the non-RAID setup, unimportant programs like Norton and assorted Asus bloatware was removed. The remaining programs were installed using the supplied DVD for the RAID setup. All "stock" drivers used and the latest Vista updates were installed. Disk indexing was turned off. Basically I tried to get the setups as close as possible.

Here are the times I measured:

Vista Startup (time from apperance of loading screen to Desktop appearance)
Non-RAID 33 secs
RAID 38 secs

Vista Hibernate (time from pressing hibernate till powerdown is complete)
No RAID 35 secs
RAID 33 secs

Vista Resume (time from apperance of loading screen to Desktop appearance)
No RAID 17 secs
RAID 17 secs

Crysis x64 (v 1.21), loading of Contact level (time taken for loading bar to reach 100%)
No RAID 35 secs
RAID 25 secs

Battery life (time to automatic hibernation at 5% battery, Power saving mode, Wifi enabled, assorted web surfing and email, Pidgin IM client running, Razer Copperhead external mouse connected)
No RAID 1hr 53min
RAID 1hr 55 min

Conclusions:
RAID0 seems to make no difference (within error) to Vista load times probably because it mostly involves small files. However, a significant reduction in the loading time for Crysis was observed, probably because large data files are accessed. Interestingly, RAID0 appears to have little or no effect on battery lifetime.

Caveat: Because the two systems are not entirely identical, treat these benchmarks with some skepticism. Furthermore, the battery life measurements are not reproducible because web surfing and email is so random.

Future work? I'm considering setting the stripe size to 2k (half the default partition size) to see if there is a noticeable increase in Vista performance and a drop in battery life. I am a little concerned that all that disk access may shorten the HDD lifetime, but not sure if this is a valid concern. The other thing is that doing so would take another week as I only have an hour or so every day to dabble, which means that I can't really use the notebook in the meantime.