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SATA Raid Drives

post #1 of 29
9/23/04 at 8:09am
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I am not aware if anyone has posted this yet but this morning I picked up my monthly edition of Maximum pc and started reading it. I suddenly noticed an article saying that while SATA Raid drives are somewhat faster in certain circumstances they do not increase speed in terms of gaming and such. Was anyone else aware of this? It's a good thing I didn't smack down the extra bucks for an sata raid drive yet!
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post #2 of 29
9/23/04 at 8:18am
Quote:
Originally Posted by exad
I am not aware if anyone has posted this yet but this morning I picked up my monthly edition of Maximum pc and started reading it. I suddenly noticed an article saying that while SATA Raid drives are somewhat faster in certain circumstances they do not increase speed in terms of gaming and such. Was anyone else aware of this? It's a good thing I didn't smack down the extra bucks for an sata raid drive yet!
That makes you wonder whos right. It also makes you wonder why a lot of computer experts use SATA and Raid. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, Im calling it a Duck.
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post #3 of 29
9/23/04 at 8:28am
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They ran a bunch of tests over a period of three days to make sure they weren't printing bologna. Apparently it is faster for some things but not so much for gaming speed. I will read more on the subject and post later.
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post #4 of 29
9/23/04 at 8:43am
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Quoted out of Maximum PC's article "The Case Against RAID 0":

"RAID 0 provides performance benefits over a single drive, but primarily in the realm of sequential transfers such as video editing or other apps that require more bandwidth."

Apparently though as far as loading times for games and such, that's more dependant on the cpu rather than the hdd. So a RAID 0 array makes viturally no difference in terms of gaming.

Game Level Load times(in seconds) printed in Maximum PC:

Doom 3: RAID ARRAY: 38 SINGLE DRIVE: 35
Far Cry: RAID ARRAY: 21 SINGLE DRIVE: 21
Battlefield 1942: RAID ARRAY: 22 SINGLE DRIVE: 22

RAID dud deliver improved scores in the Application Index of the hard drive benchmark H2benchw.

If anyone else has any other findings, please post them for comparison.
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post #5 of 29
9/23/04 at 1:44pm
I do not believe their test results. I have raid, and let me tell you, it is a HELLUVA lot faster than non raid. Games do indeed load much quicker, and I do not think it's because of my cpu. All benchmarks, such as Sandra, and HDTach, went through the roof once I installed raid. I will never, ever go back to a single drive.
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post #6 of 29
9/24/04 at 7:21am
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I highly doubt the magazine would lie. I'm sure you think the raid drives are the reason your benchmarks jumped but I highly doubt it.
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post #7 of 29
9/24/04 at 9:27am
Yep, we discussed this here about a month ago. I noted the same thing, that virtually ALL empirical benchmarks indicate that there is no general use performance benefit from SATA RAID on desktop machines. But the true believers out there maintain that all of those reports are wrong. If it works for them and they are happy with it, good for them. But personally, I trust empirical test results more than subjective opinion. So there is no SATA RAID in my future.
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post #8 of 29
9/24/04 at 12:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by exad
I highly doubt the magazine would lie. I'm sure you think the raid drives are the reason your benchmarks jumped but I highly doubt it.
I didn't say they are lying. I just dont believe the tests that these guys run. I would set my raid up against any single IDE or SATA drive anyday, and I would bet money that it would smoke it. If anyone has a single Raptor and would like to compare some benchmarks/load times of Windows/games, let me know.
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post #9 of 29
9/24/04 at 12:23pm
Well first you have to look at why RAID was implemented in the first place, it was developed for redundancy not speed, hence the name redundant array of inexpensive drives. Theorretically the gains would be marginal at best, and with your PCI bus being as slow as it is, I highly doubt you can shove much more data through there than any single drive. Now, I wouldn't believe a RAID array would be SLOWER as show with DoomIII, but if you're measuring it with hand (which I'm sure they did) there's bound to be errors in the data, but I also wouldn't expect it to be significantly faster either. RAID is hyped up to be more than it really is, that's why almost every motherboard out there supports it now. There have been many tests and review of this same thing with many varrying results, the simple problem is no computer is completely alike and unless you can isolate more variables other than hard drive read/write you cannot accurately prove anything. If it were me, I'd go for a single drive as opposed to RAID for the simple reason I really don't want to have to buy 2+ drives with only minimal, if any, gains in performance
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post #10 of 29
9/24/04 at 12:44pm
Let's see some benchies guys, download HDTach:

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach
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