Desktop Workstation RAID 1 vs Single Drive

[nilay.k.srivastava]

Hello All,

 

I'm in the process of configuring a custom built brand new Hewlett-Packard Z840 Workstation for personal use. While I'm done with the rest of the configuration I'm curious to know about the performance effects in terms of read/write speeds of RAID 1 vs a single drive. I will be using a PCIe SSD (Z Turbo Gen 2) as a boot drive. I'm pretty confused between the RAID 1 vs single drive.

 

I would need some help deciding between the two(RAID1 vs Single drive). I prefer redundancy but not at the cost of severe performance downgrades. Using RAID 10 is not an option for now due to budget constraints, although may be a possibility in the future.

 

I'll be using the workstation for Read/Write intensive applications such as ANSYS, hence a high data throughput is a huge advantage along with powerful processors, GPU and RAM. How much of a performance downgrade is observed in case of a RAID 1 vs Single drive?

 

For your ref I'm posting the complete configuration decided by me below:

• 2 X Intel Xeon E5-2687W v4 3.0 GHz 10 core CPU
• 128 GB(8X16GB) DDR4 - 2400MHz ECC LR RAM
• NVIDIA Quadro P5000 16 GB Graphics Card
• 1400W PSU
• 2X512GB Z Turbo Gen 2 PCIe SSD in RAID 1(Boot Drives)
• Windows 10 Pro x64

Your valuable insights are highly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

 

Regards

[Oshino Shinobu]

In most cases, performance remains the same unless the controller is being overworked (which won't be the case looking at your specs). Some RAID 1 solutions support striped reads, which reads data from the drives in a similar way to RAID 0, theoretically (but not practically) doubling the read performance. If you're going to be using onboard RAID, I don't think that feature is supported. 

 

Boot times will be a little slower due to the RAID controller having to initialise on boot, but other than that performance is unaffected. 

[nilay.k.srivastava]

4 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

In most cases, performance remains the same unless the controller is being overworked (which won't be the case looking at your specs). Some RAID 1 solutions support striped reads, which reads data from the drives in a similar way to RAID 0, theoretically (but not practically) doubling the read performance. If you're going to be using onboard RAID, I don't think that feature is supported. 

 

Boot times will be a little slower due to the RAID controller having to initialise on boot, but other than that performance is unaffected. 

Thanks a lot for your information. That eases out the choice of going for RAID 1 as desired.