5,400 RPM Raid0 Performance?

Looking to upgrade my laptop (currently single 320GB drive) to something with a little more breathing room lol...I have a lot of games and movies/music Id like to take with me without having to worry about bringing and or damaging my external eSATA 2TB drive.

So, I was thinking of the WD 640GB or 750GB drives...as two of these would be plenty of room for everything I need.

However, I do know that they are only 5400RPM drives but I will be running what ever dual drive setup I get in RAID0...does anyone here know how well these drives will perform in RAID0? I know a lot of you will said "SDD WITH DISK DRIVE FOR STORAGE!" but the SDD prices are outrageous and Im not THAT worried about how fast programs load or whatever...OH NO! 1 MIN TO BOOT WINDOWS AS OPPOSED TO 30 SECONDS!...come on haha!

So how would these 5400RPM drives in RAID0 perform? Good? Well? Bad???

 

RAID0 in notebooks is pretty much useless IMO since it's software RAID. Sure the sequential R/W speeds double but latency is a bit lower, which is much more important.

 

Even on a Asus W90 with the X38 chipset? Would think it would be hardware considering chipset has it...also, would you think the speed would be like SLOW slow or no better than my 320GB 7200RPM drive?

 

probably good performance, right up until you have the teeniest-tiniest unrecoverable error on either drive.

Then you stand to lose all of your data.

What happens to your 'performance' when you need to spend hours/days to recover your data?

Raid0 is like that.

Be careful out there.

 

I never had an issue with RAID 0. My desktop was in RAID 0 for 7 years without a singel failure. I also stressed the hell out of them I reformatted them every month and installed windows fresh, I found that the only way to keep the computer feeling like brand new always. Defrag didn't work as good as reformatting. So those drives were reformatted almost 100 times in 7 years and 0 failure. If you are worried get an external 2TB HDD and backup your RAID 0 750 GB x 2 drives. And yes the 640 and 750GB only come in 5400 RPM speed but honestly there isnt a huge gap in performance between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM people over exaggerate it. The western digital 9.5mm 2.5" 750GB is the best performing 750GB HDD in that form factor right now. The Toshiba one uses a little less power but is also a little slower and it only saves maybe .2 watts. WD 750GB is your best bet at 9.5mm heigth 2.5" diameter.

 

The Intel chipset uses software RAID.

 

Oh yea my desktop was hardware RAID. Is software RAID more likely to cause the HDD to fail?

 

This is what Im wondering too...

 

It won't cause the HDD to fail, but it's much more likely to cause the Raid array to fail. It's about as resilient as tissue paper in a hail storm.

 

Software RAID might be slower but I can;t imagine it making HDD's fail sooner then hardware RAID. Can you explain the technical reasons why software RAID makes a hard drive corrupt and lose all data more easily then hardware?

 

Because you are EMULATING the hardware with software. It's basically the same as using drive overlays to fool a bios that doesn't have 48bit addressing required for drives larger than 137gb in size into thinking they can. The software is more likely to become corrupted causing the array to fail.

 

I've had my SSD's in RAID 0 for like 8 months now and not a single problem.

 

8 months isn't really a long time, though that's not really the point. Software RAID will always be less reliable than hardware RAID since as stated it's just emulating the hardware. This factors into the OS/driver interaction, which makes it more complex than a hardware solution, hence making it prone to other sources of error which can damage the array (though to be fair, software RAID can also be recovered easier but is slower on the rebuild).

Also, software RAID will never perform as well as hardware RAID due to this complexity (especially in write performance), which means more overhead on the CPU and memory (and delay for calculations such as parity checks). In the end, it really depends the type of user you are. As I stated in my first post, RAID for consumers is pretty much useless as it increases risk of data loss while only giving minimal performance benefit (benchmarks will show strong sequential R/W speeds but real life performance will not be noticeably different in majority of situations).

 

OK...but I think the Asus W90vp supports hardware RAID...it IS a x38 chipset in that bad boy...I dont know though, Ill check when I get it.

 

NONE of the Intel chipsets support hardware raid as has been noted more than once in this thread. It only supports SOFTWARE raid.

 

HA! Found it!!! Look here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/370294-ultimate-w90vp-a1-review.html

ViciousXUSMC claims the W90 has hardware RAID, which I FULLY believe considering the motherboard and chipset used.

Now WHAT sgogeta4!!! hehe!

 

Vicious is wrong about it having hardware raid since it still uses the main CPU to run it. Hardware raid has not only a raid controller but it's own separate CPU to run it. NO raid built on a motherboard has a separate cpu dedicated solely to the raid controller so all of them are software raid. That is a fact and there is nothing you can say that will change that fact.

 

I think there is a lot of confusion in this thread pertaining to what 'software' and 'hardware' raid is. The kind of raid that is created purely in software and that the hardware isn't aware of is bad. However, that is not an issue since intel mobile chipsets support raid. The software is not aware of there being raid because it is implemented through the chipset. There are two kinds of this hardware based raid though. There is the kind that is true hardware raid, where a separate chip does all the work, and there is quasi-hardware raid, where the work is done by the cpu. This quasi-hardware raid, not to be confused with either hardware raid or software raid, is perfectly fine and safe to use. It doesn't have the reliability drawbacks of software raid implemented in the OS.

 

I've never had a flat tire either. Yet I keep a serviceable spare in my car.

The typical Raid0 failure (whether it is chipset or hardware or software raid) results in 100% total/complete data loss.

And that is the failure people need to prepare for.

To ignore this is, well, ignorant. To advise others to ignore this is incompetent.

 

I wouldn't say that the RAID is more likely to make the HDDs physically fail, but it is more likely to keep you from noticing the warning signs that your HDDs are physically failing. Last I checked, the kind of RAID we usually talk about in a notebook (which is chipset or firmware/driver RAID, where the RAID is handled at the BIOS/driver level and is thus "invisible" to the OS) does not pass through SMART data. Thus, you're not going to have as much warning about an HDD failure than usual. This can be especially dangerous with notebook HDDs, given how much more physical abuse they tend to take than a desktop system.

For a very quick example of the increase in risk inherent in a RAID0 array, let's assume you have 2 drives with, say, a 5% chance of failure each. This means that the chances that one of the 2 drives will fail, destroying your entire array, is 9.75%, almost double.

 

I just setup a raid array on my desktop (I know this is a laptop forum, but the principle is the same so I believe it is pertinent and allowable) using two 80gig drives. Neither of them tripped any SMART alarms by themselves, but as soon as I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager one of the drives started spitting out SMART warnings right and left. This was on an Intel P45 chipset with the ICH10R chip. I don't have access to any older Intel chipsets to test this with, but it shows at least some do support SMART.

 

I wonder if it might be a difference between desktop and notebook drivers, given that the point of this type of raid is that it's largely driven by the firmware and drivers. We'd need someone with a RAID equipped notebook like a M17X or something to check, though. I do find it interesting that one of the drives started spitting out SMART warnings right away. Did this drive still have the same SMART warnings after you took them out of the array? If it didn't, then there's something screwy about SMART support anyway...

 

I deleted the raid array and ran Spinrite on the drive and it's definitely failing now. It was probably borderline as it's several years old and I've been using it heavily since I got it. It was acting a bit flakey lately, but these were the only two identical drives I had to setup a raid with so I went with it to test out the motherboard.

Addendum: The problem testing it on a laptop is finding a drive that is verified to have SMART errors like the one desktop drive I have. Without one of those it will be impossible to tell anything

 

Well, I was actually wondering more if it would read any data at all, especially considering that you can't even get the temperature off of any notebook drive in RAID that I've ever heard of. And if you can't get even the temperature, it says bad things about the chances of getting SMART information off. Heck, even putting a HDD in a USB enclosure generally keeps you from getting SMART data.

 

I can't get temps off of my drives in raid on that desktop either and I've tried several programs. HDTune, HDTune Pro, HWMonitor, Speedfan, and none read the temps from the raid on the ICH10R. No problems reading temps on the same drives and the same controller ports running individually in AHCI or Comparability mode. I'll try to do some additional testing tomorrow when I get a chance.

 

judicator i have a m17x with intel ssd's in raid 0. Whhat do you want me to do? It's an R1 tho not an R2

 

Oh, basically we were just wondering if you could read SMART data off your SSDs while they were in RAID. Although... do SSDs even have SMART values? Well, no harm in trying. If you don't have a usual program for reading SMART data, I use the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics, which you can get off their support site. The program should work even if you don't have a WD drive, although it did suddenly occur to me that I don't know if SSDs have SMART values.

 

From what I gather some SSD's do and others don't so one would need to check the specs for their SSD to determine whether it does or not.

 

OT much? LOL!

OK...I understand the RAID thing, but is it COMPLETELY unstable and unusable? Wouldnt appear so...

 

Well, yes, we have drifted a bit off topic. In short, RAID0 is both usable and generally stable, although in a notebook it will end up putting an added load on your CPU. Whether or not this will effect you will obviously depend on your CPU load in your general workflow (or gameflow, depending). The danger of RAID0 is, obviously, that if either of the drives goes bad, then you lose everything. Our little stint of off-topicness is largely about trying to figure out how easily you could watch out for the chance of losing everything.

The thing is, if you're not worried about load speeds, why bother with RAID at all? The drives will work just as well formatted separately and used as 2 separate drives at that point. The whole point of RAID0 is really to speed up read/write operations because you can access multiple discs simultaneously. Now, in practice on a notebook drive, you won't achieve the theoretical double read/write speed because you'll lose something in overhead, but I expect performance will probably go up by, oh, maybe 50% or so compared to running the drives singly.

 

But you sacrifice a bit of access time latency for increased sequential speeds, which makes it useless IMO since access time is much more important than sequential speeds.

 

The CPU load is tiny. All it has to do is combine the striped data, not exactly demanding, and the bandwidth of any hard drive is tiny as well compared to the processor's lines of communication. For two mechanical hard drives, expect cpu load during sustained transfer to hover anywhere from 2-4% depending on you cpu.

I've been looking for as many HD tach screenshots of mechanical drives as I can find comparing Raid 0 to a single drive and they all show either the same random access times or better in Raid 0. I think what you are saying is true for other Raid levels. Also sustained transfer is far from useless as long as you aren't picking up zillions of random bits from all around the platters. And then in that case, NCQ would would have a big effect.

 

Just because you've never had a flat tire doesn't mean you can throw away your spare.

That depends strictly on application. There are applications where even a small difference (for the record, it's greater than small) makes all the difference in the world.

 

One thing you aren't taking into consideration here is that by formatting and installing windows fresh each month you are making it LESS likely that the software side of the issue would have problems. It's the SOFTWARE side we are concerned about failing on these types of raid setups, not the actual hard drive failing so your information is rather meaningless in the context of this discussion, at least in my opinion.

 

Raid 0 is a lot more durable than people think. It isn't like walking the streets of Mogadishu or crossing a highway with your eyes closed. If it was so fraught with danger, so many people wouldn't continue to use it all the time and Intel would not be continuously supporting it. Of course, as should be done regardless of using Raid 0 or not, important data should always be backed up anyway.

Although personally I wouldn't put mechanical drives in Raid 0. I would just get a really fast SSD and have a single large mechanical drive for storage. I would only do Raid 0 if I had money burning a hole in my pocket and did it with two fast SSD's.

 

At least you're consistent

 

I wouldn't put mechanical drives in Raid 0 because a good SSD is faster and easier.

 

That would be partially acceptable except for one thing: at the time of the inception of that configuration, there were no SSD around. An increase in speed was what necessitated it's creation in the first place.

Nevertheless, SSDs still are not a cost effective replacement especially when high amounts of data are concerned.

 

The performance side of RAID 0 was being used a long time before SSD's ever became popular.

 

RAID 0 is risky but wth.. didn't know intel did software RAID everytime.. IMO , an SSD + HDD for storage is best option.

 

You don't say! I don't see how that is relevant at all since we aren't talking about history here. And I was known to run some drives in raid 0 every now and then when the concept behind an SSD was just a dream.

It's not "software" raid. Like I said before it is chipset-level firmware/software raid. Everything done this way is completely separate from any software you run on the computer and is very safe. But I agree, on laptops capable of two hard drives, an SSD and slower large capacity mechanical drive is a better compromise than two mechanical drives in raid 0.

 

Actually it's quite relevant. Since this discussion is about performance and longevity is a viable part of that. Rather, it's all this talk about SSDs that seems out of place.

That would depend on your application...wouldn't it?