Raid 0-should I get 2 hard drives or 4??

1009 Views 7 Replies 4 Participants Last post by MrLinky, Nov 28, 2009

~Strawberry~

Discussion Starter · Nov 28, 2009

hey my hard drive is- http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500GB...MB-Cache-11-ms

I was thinking to get another hd to go raid 0 because i have heard it gives a good performance increase.

but i have the money to get another 3, so i have 4 hd's,

so is it a big performance inscrease from 2 to 4 and is it worth it for the money(which i have)

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MrLinky

· #2 · Nov 28, 2009

read this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-hdd,2157.html

In short, yes, 2 hdds in raid 0 will increase performance. But if you wanted to short-stroke two hdds, and have a 3rd for storage, you'll notice a huge performance increase vs two raided but unstroked hdds.

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candy_van

· #3 · Nov 28, 2009

Two or three of those short-stroked in RAID 0 would be good.

I'd use the 3rd or 4th drive as backup though (could also put 4 drives in RAID 5, but I prefer redundancy for storage).

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MrLinky

· #4 · Nov 28, 2009

So to answer your original question, yes i think raiding two drives together will get you a decent performance boost, and if you short-stroked them and got a 3rd for data, then you will have a huge performance boost without a loss of storage space. While 3 and 4 drives in a raid 0 (short-stroked or not) will give even faster read and writes vs their 2-disk counterparts, at that point the only time you'll be able to notice the difference is during long loading screens in games (ie crysis), or if you're transfering files WITHIN the raid disk. But to each his own

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~Strawberry~

Discussion Starter · #5 · Nov 28, 2009

thanks for your help guys, but how do i shortstroke?

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MrLinky

· #6 · Nov 28, 2009

you just have to create a partition on the outer edge of the disk, and leave the rest of the hdd unformatted. There are other methods, but they get pretty complex

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mechtech

· #7 · Nov 28, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrLinky

you just have to create a partition on the outer edge of the disk, and leave the rest of the hdd unformatted. There are other methods, but they get pretty complex

You can use Intel Matrix Raid and use the whole disk while still gaining short stroking benefits.

I have 2x 500gb F3s, I first formatted the drive. Then I went into the Intel RAID manager during boot up, and created a 200gb partition. I then created a second partition for storage with the remaining 800gb.

The end result? The 200GB partition gets 270mbps with 11ms access time, and the 800gb partition is 220mbps with 12ms access time, ie the short stroking is working.

Also, I wouldn't recommend more than 2 drives just because of the higher failure rate. The performance jump from 2->3 drives is nowhere near as noticeable as 1->2 drives.

Just remember, if you have an ICH9R/10R, there is absolutely no reason to waste the other unformatted space of a short stroked drive. Just don't install any programs or OS files on the 2nd partition, leave it for media that rarely gets accessed so as not to slow down the first, faster partition.

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MrLinky

· #8 · Nov 28, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by mechtech

Just remember, if you have an ICH9R/10R, there is absolutely no reason to waste the other unformatted space of a short stroked drive. Just don't install any programs or OS files on the 2nd partition, leave it for media that rarely gets accessed so as not to slow down the first, faster partition.

Totally agree. The whole principal is to limit the hdd's heads to the faster, outter section of the platter, reducing the the room it has to move and thus decreasing seek times. The more the head has to travel back to the inner partition, the bigger hits you'll be taking to read, write, and seek speeds.

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