Western Digital's Raptors in RAID-0: Are two drives better than one?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 1, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.
If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.
When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.
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Insomniac - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
I was wondering how RAID1 reads back data. I thought if it was smart, it would use both drives and improve performance. If that wasn't the case, I wondered if you could choose which drive it read from. That way, you could get a WD Raptor II and a low cost 80GB hard drive to pair up. You get the redundancy and speed of the Raptor for a lower cost. What about RAID5? (I know the ICH5/6 doesn't support it, but I thought there were some chipset m,akers that did. I would like to see what that brings to the mix. Given the choice right now, I'd take redundancy over performance. Maybe RAID 5 can give you both for less than 0+1.Pollock - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
I really wish some regular 7200 RPM drives had been used, considering someone who can afford a 74GB Raptor won't care about the costs of RAID anyway. =P Besides, to me it seems like Raptors already perform so well that it's hard to find any performance gain anyway. I was also under the impression that a lot of people with SATA drives in RAID 0 were actually getting much more noticeable performance gains; i.e. outperforming lone Raptors. Well, whatever.goku21 - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
I noticed that they came to the conclusion of only using 2 drives in a RAID setup, but in my expereince the more drives the supposed increase in performance. Perhaps they should revisit this with 4 Raptors in a RAID setup.kuk - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
Just one small thingy ... why is the manufaturer stated in the article summary "3Com/U.S. Robotics"?parrybj - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
While your overall disk bound throughput may be higher, seek times are sill only as fast as the slowest drive in the array. Since seek time is a more important desktop performance metric, I would think there would be very little benefit to doing this.Marlin1975 - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
Well the review was nice if you are thinking of running 2 raptors on a ICH5/6 SATA ports, but what about the other 99% of use that may use VIA, SiS, etc.. and/or other 7200 rpm hard drives?Matthew Daws - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
I'd be interested in seeing how using RAID0 with older drives, or one old drive and a newer drive, works out. If you're upgrading your motherboard, then given that RAID comes "for free", it could be a good way to save money by buying a second, smallish hard-drive, and using your old hard-drive with this new one in parallel...parrybj - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
Very good article. The results are not surprising. I have one comment about RAID1. While in theory it is simply a data redundancy mechanism, in practice there are performance benefits. Any good RAID1 algorithm will use read optimizations that will allow for parallellism during read requests. Thus, under the right conditions, most RAID1 arrays will achieve higher read IOPS than a single drive. Also, there may be a performance hit on writes due to the fact that writes will only be as fast as the slowest drive.djm2cmu - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
#4: Excellent introduction to all the common RAID levels here: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.htmlnofuse - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link
This article doesn't seem to be up to the standards I've come to expect from Anandtech.It would be more fair to say "Intel's onboard RAID 0 solution offers no performance gain." I'd be interested to see results from other RAID controllers. You can't take one product and make a blanket comment like "RAID 0 is not worth it." That would be like me reviewing an NVIDIA Vanta graphics card and saying "3D acceleration is not worth it."