Hard drive striping

Lee H

Hi

Has anyone ever used 2 X 1 TB striped for there OS

How does that compare to a SSD

My rig has a 300Gig SATA for the OS and 2 x 1 TB for storage and was thinking about striping the TB's but only if there is a big enough difference in performance

Any help would be great

Lee H

I just realised that ive had 3 scuzzy drives for a while just dug one out and its 3 of these here

IBM Ultrastar 18ES DNES-309170 9GB HDD Hard Drive - Reviews & Prices @ Yahoo! Shopping

I also have a scuzzy PCI card and ribbon

Would using these 3 drives striped be any faster than 1 x 1 TB SATA or even 2 X 1 TB SATA

Any help would be great

ajs1976

how fast are the 300 gb and the TB drives? What are your options for a controller? Software or hardware raid?

If you have the same drives specs (RPM, connection speeds, etc). A hardware mirrored set should be slower then a single drive, because of a single controller writing to two drives. If you can setup duplexing (mirrored drives on different controllers), then that will be faster then the single drive, because now you have two controllers doing the work for you.

Lee H

ajs1976 wrote: »

how fast are the 300 gb and the TB drives? What are your options for a controller? Software or hardware raid?

If you have the same drives specs (RPM, connection speeds, etc). A hardware mirrored set should be slower then a single drive, because of a single controller writing to two drives. If you can setup duplexing (mirrored drives on different controllers), then that will be faster then the single drive, because now you have two controllers doing the work for you.

Without opening my PC case ide say they were all 7200 rpm, the 2 TB's drives are samsung F3 spinpoint drives

How can I see what my options are for a controller, never done this before so apologies for being a noob

With the Scuzzy PCI card thats a hardware raid isnt it, I have 3 X 9 gig drives that I could just use for my OS, would that be faster than 2 TB;s drives striped

ajs1976

Just because it is a SCSI card, doesn't mean it has RAID capabilities.

I might not be comparing them properly or looking at the right info, but it looks like the old IBM drives have a transfer rate of 40 MB/sec while the samsungs are 3 GB/sec. That is a huge difference, so I would stick with the new drives and scrap the old IBMs.

Why are you looking at switching the drives?

tiersten

Lee H wrote: »

Has anyone ever used 2 X 1 TB striped for there OS

You can if you want to but remember that reliability for striping with no parity is bad. It isn't just double what the failure rate of a single drive is as either drive failing will mean all your data is gone with no chance of recovery.

Lee H wrote: »

How does that compare to a SSD

It doesn't. The advantage of SSD is high sustained throughput which you can duplicate if you have enough spindles in your stripe but the other main advantage is extremely fast "seek" times which you can't replicate.

Lee H wrote: »

I also have a scuzzy PCI card and ribbon

SCSI :P

Lee H wrote: »

Would using these 3 drives striped be any faster than 1 x 1 TB SATA or even 2 X 1 TB SATA

They're ancient drives so no. Same RPM as a regular consumer/desktop HD. Limited to 80MBps via the old parallel SCSI interface. Not worth it. Waste of space and power.

tiersten

ajs1976 wrote: »

I might not be comparing them properly or looking at the right info, but it looks like the old IBM drives have a transfer rate of 40 MB/sec while the samsungs are 3 GB/sec. That is a huge difference, so I would stick with the new drives and scrap the old IBMs.

That is the bus speed. 40MBps from the SCSI interface and 3Gbps from the SATA interface. You won't get that from a HD except from the cache and that is generally tiny. That said, a 40Mbps+ sustained transfer rate is easily obtainable from consumer/desktop drives now. The SATA-I interface is fine for a HD but you might have issues with SSDs in the future.

Lee H

OK then I hear ya them IBM drives are back in the s**t box

Had a thought, it seems crazy to have such large drives in a stripe cos if one goes then the data on both has gone, so what if I had my 300 GIG as disk 1, then partitioned both my TB's with 300 GIG partition as disk 2 and 3, then stiped the 3 of them, plus leaving me with 700 GIG on each TB for storage

Would that work?

Just looked into my mobo and it doesnt have RAID biult in so does this mean I can only have a software RAID

ajs1976

you would need to purchase a RAID controller card.

Lee H

Thanks ajs I shall be purchasing this baby very soon

StarTech.com 4 Port PCI SATA RAID Controller Adapter Card - Aria Technology

If I connect my 3 SATA drives to this, 300gig, 1TB and 1TB could I have the 1TB's partitioned 300GIG so I have 3 X 300GIG stripe for my OS this would then give me 2 X 700GIG storage

Would that work and would I get 3 X the speed of 1 single SATA drive

SteveLord

If you have/get a motherboard with the Intel ICH10R controller, you're better of than any cheap RAID card. They're cheap for a reason. If you do not use your computer for more than surfing the web, you will not notice any difference in performance. But you'll have wasted a lot of time in reformatting a large set of disks.