RAID questions, Samsung Spinpoint drives

[roast]

Hi guys,

I'm not 100% clued up on RAID, so just want some clarification and opinions.

I plan on buying 4 Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA2 32MB 7200RPM drives, all at a healthy price of €80 from Komplett.ie
I will be using the onboard RAID on my XFX 780i SLI
I plan to set up these drives so that two of them will be RAID 0 Striped, and the other two drives will be set up in RAID 1 to mirror the first two.
As far as I'm aware, this is called RAID 1+0, right?

Theoretically, the speed of my primary drive will be 14400RPM, please confirm if this is correct.

Can anyone vouch for the reliability and performance of these drives? I see some good things mentioned about them.

Any comments about this setup? Anything else I should know?

Thanks in advance,
Mick.

 

[Mussels]

Theoretically, the speed of my primary drive will be 14400RPM, please confirm if this is correct.

If you get two cars traveling side by side at 100MPH, do they suddenly do 200MPH? If you let them drive for an hour, will they cover 100 miles or 200 miles?
You just manged to hit one of my pet hates, thats all.


the rest of your post is correct (its normally called raid 0+1, however)

 

[human_error]

I have a sammy spinpoint F1 1TB and it's a terrific drive, so i will vouch for their capability, reliability and performance.

As for your RAID even though you are striping 2 7200s don't assume it'll be like having a 14400 speed drive as your bandwidth will significantly jump your latencies will not halve, so you'll have very nice bandwidth and decent latencies but not the same as if it was a 14.4k drive (9 women can't make a baby in a month you know ).

That should be a very nice setup for having very fast speeds with a failure redundancy backup in case of a drive failing.

 

[Mussels]

(9 women can't make a baby in a month you know ).

Oh god, i so need to remember that next time someone tells me his dual core 2GHz is "4GHz of power"

 

[roast]

Point taken. Obviously I have to remember never to believe Kompletts support then.

Thanks for the comments though.

Can anyone report any issues I may have when setting up this configuration, or anything to look out for?

-Mick.

 

[Mussels]

if you change motherboards, you lose the array, so you lose all data on it. thats about it. otherwise it wont operate any differently to a fast 2TB drive.

 

[human_error]

Oh god, i so need to remember that next time someone tells me his dual core 2GHz is "4GHz of power"

I know how you feel with that - I get serious internet rage when i trawl ebay for some good cpu deals and see "9ghz Q6600 775 cpu". It's one of my biggest pet hates alongside the "apple can't get viruses" and "RAIDs are the best backup for keeping data safe" which brings me onto...

Point taken. Obviously I have to remember never to believe Kompletts support then.

Thanks for the comments though.

Can anyone report any issues I may have when setting up this configuration, or anything to look out for?

-Mick.

As mussels has already said RAIDs are linked to the controller they are setup on (the model, not the specific controller so an identicle raid controller/southbridge/motherboard would be ok) - if you intend to replace that mobo and don't want to re-do you raid again then getting a pci-e controller will let you keep the raid across different motherboards, although you can just backup your data by killing you mirror raid and copying important data onto one of those drives when you migrate between motherboards and have to re-do the raid.

Also please note that although the RAID mirror will protect you from a hard drive failure it will not protect against things like viruses, so if you do have irreplaceable data ensure you keep it backed up properly. You'll also need to do a clean windows install to be able to put the raid drivers into your windows installation (no copying a current windows install over i'm afraid). Other than that have fun with your raid.

 

[Bundy]

I have used RAID O +1 for a couple of years and in the end, I don't think it's worth it. I could never get the system 100% stable umless I stored the page file on a separate disk. Running the OS on RAID 0 and keeping files backed up on non RAID drives sounds boring but works

 

[roast]

How exactly do you mean it was unstable?

-mick.

 

[Bundy]

Whenever I ran a stability test that used more than my RAM (e.g. large fft) the system would often crash when the HDD lit up or soon after. The tests were only stable if I limited the RAM usage or set up the page file on another non RAID disk. This was a problem when I had 2GB ram but now I have 4GB and RAID 0. I can't therefore be certain that RAID 0 is stable but it never crashes any more.

The RAID controllers on mobos rely on some fairly heavy work for the CPU, NB and SB. They are not an independant system like an add on card would have. I figure they don't go so good if there are too many drives or the work load is high.

Lastly, if you intend doing any OC with RAID installed, be prepared to loose the whole array if you push your RAM to instability. It doesn't happen often but when it does, not even RAID 1 can save ya - all goneI know.

I'll come back to my previous post. Use the mobos RAID 0 because it's fast. Do your own back ups to somewhere else, don't rely on RAID1 to get you through.