RAID and performance gain

Currently, I'm running out of HDD space, so i decided to buy a second HDD soon. I'd like to know what's the transfer gain after RAIDing two drives. I have a stock Seagate ST9200420AS. Currently, maximum transfer is 65MiB while reading and 62MiB while writing (ATTO Disk Benchmark). Could someone post their measurements while having two ST9200420AS in RAID 0?

 

Yeah with Raid 0 (Striping), you gain lots of horsepower for your data traffic. With 320 GB 7200 x2 Seagate i got average of 130 Mb/s in HD Tach. I don't understand who doesn't use raid ith raid capability notebook. It's a huge performance gain. Nearly you don't need to buy an SSD.

 

Dont lie to the guy.
While raided 7200RPM drives are nice they have no where near the power of a decent SSD. Just in bigblock (which is where you get the 130) i double that with my SSD. But i also have a latency of 0.1ms compared to the 12+ of a 7200RPM RAID array.

As to who wouldnt use striping. Those who prefer safer systems and chose to mirror. Or those that dual boot with seperate hard drives for each OS. I actually have 4 hard drives with 4 different OS's on them. I keep a 500GB drive for data and then i can just swap out hard drives and have a completely new system according to what drive i have in (Win7 in the SSD)

To answer your question kiziu. Typically you will see about a 95% increase in throughput, a slight decrease in latency and overall snappier system with a RAID0 array. If you're wanting to increase throughput then that is the way to go. It wont make a night and day difference, but you should be able to tell.

 

I don't trust SSD technology right now... The technology needs time to be good... Cause there's a 'used' issue and also if it's nearly %80 full then performance downs %20. (Anandtech SSD review.) And also trimming issues and low capacity.

As you mentioned Kamin Majere, yes of course it's blazingly fast. But 7200rpm raid system is fast but you have more mobile storage in it also. With new 1 TB 2.5 inches hard drives you can travel with 2 TB. And with these type of laptops i think internal storage is important cause it's a desktop replacement.

Then may be i'm curious about mini pci-e SSDs if they are available for P78xx series. If they work you have a SSD system drive and also 2 SATA slots for storage...

 

How much time is required, SSD's have been in wide spread use for about a decade. The only difference is that now the prices have dropped enough for normal consumers to get in on the action
And if SSD's arent good, then you have some pretty insane expectations, they dominate Hard drives in every way but price (and capacity but we're tied there)

All storeage drive will decrease severly the closer to full they are. The only reason that SSD's get the bad rep for it is because a mechanical drive is already so slow that the performance loss isnt as noticable (60MB/s to 44MB/s is neglegable) but with a SSD the loss is sometiems the actual speed of a Hard drive (260MB/s to 208MB/s)

Trim is a nice feature to have, and most new drives support it, but honestly with a good controller its pretty much a nonissue. The controllers should be able to handle it. The only time it becomes important is with a drive that is nearly full (hence the drop in preformance as the controller has to move things around to find a place for new data)

Yep blazing fast and great storage. There are already 512GB SSD's and they are in the correct formfactor. The 1TB drives are 12.5mm drives and wont fin in most notebooks.

 

1 TB 12.5mm is really thick Thanks for great info again I want to buy SSD raid setup. But i'm not sure if the storage area will be enough for me. And I don't want to use external drivers. Carry them out to everywhere i go.

 

Yes! SSD's are blazing fast! even faster when u raid 0 it! My single SSD in my XPS kills my desktop's raid 0 500gb@7200rpm SATA 2 3.0Gb/s! Darn pricy but it's worth it if your running large apps!

 

You're not talking about a standart SSD! You're talking about Vertex!

 

Sorry, i wasnt clear, when i speak about SSD's i'm only talking about ones with Indilinix/Intel/Samsung controllers. The rest i dont even take into consideration.

 

wEEE, look at me adventuring myself out of Asus forums

Anyways, here is my computer before/after Raid0:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5224009&postcount=2642

 

Anyone wants to share a SSD HD Tune or HD Tach benchmark Screenshot?

 

Heres my Crystal Mark

Crystal disk mark benchmark
Sequential Read : 238.972 MB/s
Sequential Write : 168.591 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 158.400 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 164.529 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 22.415 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 16.879 MB/s

I just happen to remember it in the SSD Thread, i wont be home until saturday, but i'll try to remember to run the other tests for you.


128GB Supertalent UltraDrive (Indilinix Controller)

 

Thanks for the bench Kamin Majere...

 

lol! Now you're the one who is lying. SSD's aren't even in widespread use right now. They are still cost prohibitive when compared to HDD's.

 

Ok, where does widespread = common = casual use come in? He is living no dream, as they are in "Widespread" use. Cost prohivative has always been an issue with every new technology! But the more we buy the more production and the lower costs. This is the cycle of consumer marketable tech, first you see specialty, then widespread, then common, then casual, and finally standard use............

 

When they are actually in widespread use. SSD's weren't even available ten years ago, and he claimed they were in widespread use. You're playing games with terminology in order to justify a lie.

In fact, I wouldn't even claim SSD's were in widespread use until at least a year after they were included as standard equipment by notebook manufacturers. Of course this hasn't happened yet, because the tech is still deemed to be cost prohibitive to the average consumer.

 

Once manufacturers include them as standard or popular upgrade it starts to become common use as then it is no longer an addition or user upgrade. Now widely available as a user upgrade and generally accepted as an expensive upgrade path for some time it becomes widespread. No symantics here, they are highly uncommon to come across but in widespread use.

Look at 7200 RPM drives today in laptops, they were just in widespread use not all too long ago. Now they are common as they are not even an upgrade path in some models ............

 

I did not mean widespread use by us "normal" people. The Government and military have been using them for a very long time.

Just because consumers haven't had the money or the capability to have something doesn't mean its not there being used.

And yes i have mentioned they are still expensive; not cost prohibitive, but expensive.

 

Speaking as someone who used to work in military procurement related field (for both weapons and information systems), I can tell you that what the government uses is normally not what you can buy on the consumer market. The tech is often very different because the products are designed to operate in very different applications and environments. The tech used in current commercially available SDD's was very recently developed, and is still in ongoing development to eliminate various problems that have appeared in the first generation products. The original posters concerns are still valid.

TRIM is also very new and untested. I wouldn't buy an SSD even if it were cost competititive until after the first gen TRIM drives are released, and after they are tested on Win 7 RTM.

Most notebooks come standard with 500GB HDD's right now. If you want to put 500 GB of SSD storage in your notebook, you need to be prepared to spend about as much as you would need to spend to buy another notebook. You can get over half SSD performance with twice the space for about 1/5 the price by RAIDing another 500GB HDD. I wouldn't say that SSD's are mearly expensive, I'd say they are still cost prohibitive.

 

Over half the SSD performance? You will NOT have an access time of .01 ms, or even close to it, and that is the SSDs biggest advantage.

I understand you're probably comparing read/write speeds, but you can't leave out other variables like they don't exist or matter.

Obviously a lot of people consider SSDs to be very expensive per GB (comparing to HDDs), but it all depends on your budget.

 

Interesting topic.

I agree with starcub.

In the end though, its not the read/write speed or the access times of SSDs that really matters, but the non-mechanical operation of it. Better reliability, lower power consumption and noiseless.

Of course SSDs are the logical step forward from current mechanical hard drives, better this better that...true. But unless your working with HD video editing or using them in servers etc, mechanical hard drives are perfectly adequate. For what the average person does on a computer, SSD's right now are too expensive and not worth it.

In this current time, who really needs ultra fast read/write speeds and ultra low access times when opening a word document, playing a game or copying a file???

Person A: "Wow, i opened a document in 0.1 seconds using SSDs"
Person B: "and???"

 

Have you ever used a SSD? It seems by your post that you have no experience with them. You won't notice that the drive isn't mechanical, proper working hard drives should be reliable and quiet also, and the SSD using less power will be negligible and unnoticeable. The only thing you will notice from it being non-mechanical is the access time...

If you had a large quantity of customers you would see that loading times are VERY important to the users, and the fact that the computer loads slow is the main reason for complaints and wanting to upgrade. It's not about bragging rights (Don't know how you got that..), it's about usability and efficiency.

 

Loading times for what? Vista already has tech's to speed up loading via much cheaper solid state modules, in addition to pre-loading apps in RAM. For most users, the amount of RAM they have installed in their laptops is probably enough to allow for sufficiently fast operation while browsing the web or editing documents. SSD's might be important to enthusiast users: people who edit large files (video, photoshop, databases, etc), or for some games. The question is: is it worth the additional cost -- for most the answer is still no.

 

Loading times for everything. Every read, every write, and every time the drive is accessed will be improved. Superfetch and Prefetch are much slower when compared to a SSD. I didnt say Vista wasnt GOOD at using RAM (which it does), but most customers dont have hardware that is up to the task of supporting Vista + several years of use, many with multi-users. I have had a ridiculous amount of users contacting me by referral to convert Vista installed computers to XP. Properly setup (Custom XP doesnt hurt either) it will last for much longer than a Vista installed computer due to more spare hardware which leaves more room for future growth. The amount of time needed before maintenence must be done on the computer is lengthened, and that is important to them. I do custom Vista installations as well, although the customers simply seem much more satisfied with XP instead of Vista, and they come back with problems less frequently. Speaking from experience, not my opinions.

It depends how much space you need, the average home user doesn't need more than 25 GB of space. I am speaking from experience, this is what they have told me.

Vertex 30GB is $150 on newegg atm, and probably cheaper at other vendors. Price goes up and down, it just went back up (was ~$119 with rebate and $129 without)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227468
Price difference is not that great compared to large capacity 7200 rpm HDDs. The difference in speed is much greater than the difference in price.

If they already have a HDD in the computer, use it for more storage...

If they need EVEN MORE internal storage and don't have the budget for a large capacity SSD, obviously a HDD is the better choice.