Guest Posted April 13, 2003 Report Posted April 13, 2003 Some PC manufacturers are advertising RAID drives in their new "gaming machines". From what ive read the RAID drives work by having 2 drives (2X120gig, 7200rpms) working in tandem, the OS shows the 2 drives as being 1 (c: = 240gigs).. and the supposed improvement to the game comes from the RAID drives "splitting" the data on anything you install on the 2 drives. So BCM would have like 50% of its stuff on 1 drive, the other 50% on the other. Hard drive access time is cut in half since each HDD reads half of it. So if an IDE takes 2 secs to read something, the RAID does it in 1 second since each drive reads half the program. Or something like that. What say you? Does it really improve the system's performance for games?
Guest Posted April 13, 2003 Report Posted April 13, 2003 And new avatar, 'cause im a hopeless romantic
Guest JuanFermin Posted April 13, 2003 Report Posted April 13, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Tac: RAID drives work by having 2 drives (2X120gig, 7200rpms) working in tandem, the OS shows the 2 drives as being 1 (c: = 240gigs).. .....Does it really improve the system's performance for games? I know this was posted for the SC but I know a little bit about it. Basically it depends on the setup you have. If you have "Hardware RAID", where the RAID is being handles by the motherboard or a dedicated card, then yes, you will see an improvement on any program that is disk access intensive, but if you are acheiving the RAID by means of software (where Windows 2K handles it for you) then, you probably won't see any improvement and, depending on your processor and hard drive types you might even see a degradation of performance. P.S. Keep in mind that if any one of the two hard drives fail, you will lose ALL of your data. You can prevent this by using a RAID 5 Array, where you add a third drive for redundancy, but most motherboards don't support RAID 5 so you must get an additional card to do that.
Guest Posted April 13, 2003 Report Posted April 13, 2003 Yeah they be advertising HWR controlled RAID. I wonder just how much improvement it is supposed to give one. Most games I know of use RAM rather than HDD swap files.
Tyrn Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Fermin: Keep in mind that if any one of the two hard drives fail, you will lose ALL of your data. You can prevent this by using a RAID 5 Array, where you add a third drive for redundancy, but most motherboards don't support RAID 5 so you must get an additional card to do that. Of course, the drawback to RAID 5 (which we use on our primary data server) is that disk writes take up to 3 times longer than other types of disk writes RAID or otherwise. Longer disk writes would negate the reason for using RAID in a gaming environment.
Guest JuanFermin Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Tyrn: Of course, the drawback to RAID 5 (which we use on our primary data server) is that disk writes take up to 3 times longer than other types of disk writes RAID or otherwise. Longer disk writes would negate the reason for using RAID in a gaming environment. While it's true that on a RAID 5 the writes to the disk take longer, it mostly depends on the type of Hard drive. With SCSI, you're looking at about 1 and 1/2X and with IDE about 2X, again assuming Hardware RAID, still the read is about 2X faster. If you stick to a simple stripe with only 2 disks has about the same write time, but 2X faster on read time. Software RAID however will severly slow down your machine, especially if the drives are IDE
Supreme Cmdr Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Tac: What say you? Does it really improve the system's performance for games? It depends on the type of RAID. There are more than three types of RAID array configs; performance, failsafe, performance+failsafe. Choose wisely - and if you can afford it.
Commander Jamont Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 ok here something on raids i use at work Raid 1: 1 disc of 72 gig the comp see's that one only , the second disc of 72 gig is a mirror of the other so when the other fails it auto switches on the other (hardware raid only) Raid 5: something only with more discs this is pure for servers , dont use it with gaming its to expensive for that
Torrellan Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 As the SC pointed out, there are several types of RAID configurations. RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 3 and RAID 5 are the most common. If you are planning to use a RAID Array in a gaming rig, DO NOT use a software based RAID manager. This uses precious CPU time that could otherwise be spent handling the game software. I personally use a 4 disk IDE RAID 5 Array on my AMD XP 2700+ rig and it works very well. RAID 5 however is not really built for performance but rather more for redundancy. I have high enough system specifications that the small hit I take in drive write operations is really not noticeable. I am using a hardware RAID controller by 3Ware. Specifically the Escalade 7500-8 model with 4 80GB Western Digital 7200 RPM 8MB cache hard drives. Since I run my system 24/7 due to SETI@Home processing, I opted for the protection RAID 5 offers. My system can sustain 1 failed hard drive and still remain fully operational. If I have a drive fail on me, I will take a small hit in performance (nothing to drastic) until I replace the bad drive and rebuild the array. My serious recommendation for a gaming platform if you do not need the redundancy offered by RAID 5 is to go RAID 0. RAID 0 is also known as striping. It works essentially the same way as RAID 5 in that it writes the data across all the disks in the array. Unlike RAID 5 however, if one drive were to fail your entire array crashes and you lose your data. RAID 0 will give you about the best drive performance you can get for read operations since it can pull data from all of the hard drives on the array at once. Typically when you are running games, this is usually what is occuring. Write operations are much faster than RAID 5 because unlike RAID 5, it does not have to worry about writing the ECC (recovery) information to the Array. RAID 1 is called "Mirror" because you essentially have 1 drive acting as a complete mirror (invisible) to your active hard drive. In the event of a failure to your main hard drive, the RAID 1 mirror automatically kicks in without interruption. This offers you no performance advantage what-so-ever (only redundancy) and is not something the average performance hungry gamer would want. When deciding to build an array the second biggest decision (after choosing your hardware RAID controller) you need to make is finding the right hard drives to operate in your array. Do you go for IDE or SCSI? IDE is generally cheaper and with the new performance standards on these drives the average gamer really won't need to look at SCSI. SCSI offers the absolute best performance but the price is extremely high per drive. Whichever technology you choose, make sure you get a drive that can operate at fast RPM speeds and has as much on board drive cache as you can get. These will give you a BIG boost to performance. You will also need to look at drive throughput. The typical IDE drive will function at ATA-100 or ATA-133 transfers. The 133 of course has faster throughput but this should not be your single deciding factor when purchasing a drive. You would be better off with an ATA-100 if you can get a drive with high RPM speed AND high drive cache for example. Lastly, make sure your rig has a sufficient power supply to handle your big boy RAID array. My current system runs a 430 watt power supply. If you are still running a system at 300 watts or lower, it would be a good idea to invest in a higher end power supply before you embark on your RAID adventure. This should about cover the basics. Happy hunting! Torrellan
philgreen Posted April 14, 2003 Report Posted April 14, 2003 Raid 5 just got a whole lot cheaper!!! Check out the new HighPoint RocketRAID 1540 SATA Controller... Retails for $90 and supports Raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JABOD. Yes, it's serial ATA, but comes with IDE adapters... That oughta take a bite outa' the RAID 5 setup! A threesome o' nice WD 7200 RPM 8MB cache drives would be sweet on this....
Torrellan Posted April 15, 2003 Report Posted April 15, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Remo: Raid 5 just got a whole lot cheaper!!! Check out the new HighPoint RocketRAID 1540 SATA Controller... Retails for $90 and supports Raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JABOD. Yes, it's serial ATA, but comes with IDE adapters...Just a word of caution... I just looked at the specs on this controller and it doesn't seem very impressive. The card only has support for 4 channels (1 hard drive on each channel). Here is the important part however, two of those four channels are external. What that means is that in order to have a RAID 5 array, you would have to have two drives mounted internally and 1 external of your case. Or 2 external hard drives with one internal. This sounds pretty flaky to me. Also it doesn't exactly say that it is running all RAID handling through it's own processing chip. This leads me to think that it is probably stealing some percentage of processing time from the CPU. If you are on a budget, it may be a card worth looking at for a RAID 0 fix but if you really want performance and a robust RAID controller, I would still have to choose 3Ware. Torrellan
Akira Posted April 17, 2003 Report Posted April 17, 2003 Also, you need to understand, raid controllers from Promise and Highpoint that are cheap to affordable are not true hardware raid controllers. They use your system memory and will put more of a hit on your CPU than a true hardware raid controller. As a general rule, if your RAID card does not come with it's own onboard RAM and slots for upgrading said RAM, it will eat some cpu cycles. The good news is, unless you're running a P2 or older P3 CPU and have 256mb or RAM or more, you're not likely to notice the performance hit from a card typical to Promise and Highpoint. In addition the best combination of performance and redundancy is 0+1. It's a stripped array mirrored with another stripped array and is a touch faster than RAID 5. However, you will need, at a minimum, a 4 channel raid card for maximum efficiency. Also, you will want to purchase 4 matched hard drives (although not necessary, but you will need 4 drives and your raid array will only be as large as 2x the smallest capacity). IDE is cheap and if all you're doing is gaming, then you can set up a fairly large array for under $300. However, if you're only using the array to speed up your gaming performance, then you'd be better off spending money on other parts of your system. Namely: CPU, RAM, Video card/Monitor, Cooling and Internet/Lan access speed with portabillity for LAN gaming being a wise consideration also.
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