SSHDs in raid 0 for game storage

[cptjackawesome]

Hello everyone, 

 

I am currently running a Build with a nvme boot drive and sshd for storage. 

 

Currently, I have one 2tb firecuda 2.5in and I just bought another for $90 each.

 

However, with only 8gb cache and 5400rpm speed, my load times are longer than I'd like. I know straight ssd is ideal, but I like storage and don't want to drop $1000+ on a 4tb 850 evo. 

 

So, I thought that since the data on the drives will be steam and origin installs, that running both sshds in raid 0 using my z270-ar motherboard will give me much better load times without incurring additional cost. It would also leave me with one storage drive in windows, which is cleaner. 

 

Before the drive arrives though, I wanted to do research and find out if there were going to be any potential issues before I started formatting drives. 

 

Has anyone done this before? Has it helped, and if so how much? 

 

Thanks.

[Enderman]

SSHDs suck, get a good hard drive and back it up instead of doing raid.

[cptjackawesome]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

SSHDs suck, get a good hard drive and back it up instead of doing raid.

I did have a 4tb hdd, but the only 2.5 ones were really unstable, thick as all hell,  and cost the same amount as 2 2tb firecudas.

[KuJoe]

Avoid FakeRAID (motherboard RAID) at all costs! Software RAID is better in almost every aspect. That being said, I have no experience with SSHDs so I can't comment on performance.

[cptjackawesome]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

Avoid FakeRAID (motherboard RAID) at all costs! Software RAID is better in almost every aspect. That being said, I have no experience with SSHDs so I can't comment on performance.

The only raid stuff I saw was in the bios under "Intel rapid storage whatever"

 

What is the preferred raid software, and what is so wrong with the motherboard version? 

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Avoid FakeRAID (motherboard RAID) at all costs! Software RAID is better in almost every aspect. That being said, I have no experience with SSHDs so I can't comment on performance.

Software raid also sucks, just one power fluctuation and your entire drive gets corrupted.

I don't recommend anyone does raid unless they get a proper server-grade raid card or battery backup.

[Oshino Shinobu]

You'd gain basically nothing from doing this. Unless you're only launching the same games over and over, the data that's stored in the cache will be mostly useless. Even then, if you consider that modern games are coming in at over 50GB, 16GB of the cache isn't enough anyway, even if you could control what was in it. 

 

As for RAID 0, it's just bad for most things. It improves sequential read/writes, but loading a game doesn't really use that, it's more of a random load, negating benefits of RAID 0 and still having the data reliability issues. 

 

Best option is to not use RAID and buy an SSD for your most frequently used games. Go for a normal HDD for regular storage. The only time I can think to use an SSHD is when a system only has room for a single drive but large capacity is still needed. In a normal system with multiple drive slots available, they're a waste of money. 

[Droidbot]

why 2.5"? You're settling for worse performance.. 

[TheKDub]

6 minutes ago, cptjackawesome said:

Hello everyone, 

 

I am currently running a Build with a nvme boot drive and sshd for storage. 

 

Currently, I have one 2tb firecuda 2.5in and I just bought another for $90 each.

 

However, with only 8gb cache and 5400rpm speed, my load times are longer than I'd like. I know straight ssd is ideal, but I like storage and don't want to drop $1000+ on a 4tb 850 evo. 

 

So, I thought that since the data on the drives will be steam and origin installs, that running both sshds in raid 0 using my z270-ar motherboard will give me much better load times without incurring additional cost. It would also leave me with one storage drive in windows, which is cleaner. 

 

Before the drive arrives though, I wanted to do research and find out if there were going to be any potential issues before I started formatting drives. 

 

Has anyone done this before? Has it helped, and if so how much? 

 

Thanks.

 

Get a refund on the drive and get a WD Black or this: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000DM006/dp/B01IEKG402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497835055&sr=8-1&keywords=seagate+barracuda+2tb

 

It'll be quite a bit faster than the one you just bought, then save some more money and get a 500GB or 1TB SSD for games and whatever else, then the HDDs can be for general storage, or for things you don't care if they take longer to load.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

Software raid also sucks, just one power fluctuation and your entire drive gets corrupted.

I don't recommend anyone does raid unless they get a proper server-grade raid card or battery backup.

Generally best to avoid RAID in pretty much all situations where down time isn't completely unacceptable. If there's money for RAID, go for a good backup instead. RAID offers no solution for corruption, ransomware and things generally fucking up. 

 

I actually got lucky recently as the RAID 0 I had been running on two HDDs for a few years gave out just after I had finished moving everything over to a NAS and the important stuff to an additional backup. 

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Generally best to avoid RAID in pretty much all situations where down time isn't completely unacceptable. If there's money for RAID, go for a good backup instead. RAID offers no solution for corruption, ransomware and things generally fucking up. 

 

I actually got lucky recently as the RAID 0 I had been running on two HDDs for a few years gave out just after I had finished moving everything over to a NAS and the important stuff to an additional backup. 

Yeah, raid is not a replacement for backing up to a separate drive

[cptjackawesome]

There's a lot of responses, and I appreciate the feedback:

 

First, I took all my hdd cages out for my water loop, so the 2 2.5s on the back are what I have to work with. 

 

Second, I know something like a 7200rpm would be better, but they don't make one larger than 1tb in the 2.5 form factor (that I could find). 

 

I have actually seen the sshd improve load times when I play the same game a few times in a row (which I do). 

 

Finally, like I said, all the data on the drive will be recoverable through steam, origin, etc. and the cloud saves. That being said, I don't want the drives crapping out, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to re-download everything once again. 

 

The question I have now is just how unstable is raid 0? I mean, Ive heard that if a drive dies you lose everything, but is it really so fickle? I have a quality evga 750w gold psu which is new, so I have breathing room, even with my oc. 

 

 

[reniat]

14 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Software raid also sucks, just one power fluctuation and your entire drive gets corrupted.

I don't recommend anyone does raid unless they get a proper server-grade raid card or battery backup

ESPECIALLY if you're doing RAID 0. 

[KuJoe]

10 minutes ago, cptjackawesome said:

The only raid stuff I saw was in the bios under "Intel rapid storage whatever"

 

What is the preferred raid software, and what is so wrong with the motherboard version? 

You can build a striped disk in Windows Disk Management, it's really simple and more resilient than FakeRAID. If your motherboard breaks or you do a firmware update, you could easily lose all of your data on that array, with software RAID you can move the drives to a completely different PC and as long as the drives aren't encrypted you can import them back in without having to redownload everything. I use RAID0 SSDs for my game library and switched to software RAID after the FakeRAID on 2 motherboards forced me to keep redownloading my games multiple times a month when I made changes to the BIOS.

10 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Software raid also sucks, just one power fluctuation and your entire drive gets corrupted.

I don't recommend anyone does raid unless they get a proper server-grade raid card or battery backup.

It's still significantly better than FakeRAID though in terms of reliability since it can withstand a motherboard failure, one less thing to worry about. RAID0 is great for somebody with multiple drives and once one big drive with good performance and for a Steam library, it's perfect. If you lose a drive or the data gets corrupted you just redownload your games and you're good to go. No need to make backups since everything is just a few clicks away from being back to how it was yesterday.

[reniat]

Just now, cptjackawesome said:

The question I have now is just how unstable is raid 0? I mean, Ive heard that if a drive dies you lose everything, but is it really so fickle?

It's not about the RAID array being fickle, it's just statistics. When you stripe your data across 2 drives, you make the data on one given drive unusable by itself. Think of it this way: 

Let's take the sentence "I like raid arrays!" and stripe it and lose half. We would be left with "I*l*k* *a*d*a*r*y*!", which means nothing. There is mathematically no way to re-construct the missing pieces, you are simply missing too much info.

 

The reason you are more likely to lose data in RAID 0 is not that the drives itself are more unstable, it's just that any drive going out results in complete data loss (without fancy recovery which i promise is not in your price range) and with 2 drives you are basically taking the lower of the 2 drives' lifespans. 

[KuJoe]

2 minutes ago, cptjackawesome said:

The question I have now is just how unstable is raid 0? I mean, Ive heard that if a drive dies you lose everything, but is it really so fickle?

Yes, RAID0 has no redundancy. If you want redundancy and performance than RAID10 or RAID50 is what you want but you'll need at least 4 or 6 drives for that.

 

0 = Striped, no redundancy, best performance, all space usable, minimum 2 drives.

1 = Mirrored, redundant drives, lowest performance, half the space, requires even number of drives.

10 = Mirrored then striped, redundant drives, second best performance, half the space, requires even number of drives (min 4).

5 = Parity, N+1 redundancy, adequate performance with hardware RAID but software RAID will use your CPU for parity calculation, only 1 drive lost for parity bit, requires at least 3 drives.

50 = Parity + Striped, N+1 redundancy for each stripe, better performance than RAID5 (still uses CPU for parity calculation in software), 1 drive lost for parity bit per stripe, requires at least 6 drives.

 

And RAID6 and RAID60 is essentially RAID5 and RAID50 with an extra parity drive for N+2 redundancy.

 

Hope that helps break down the different RAID types easier.

[reniat]

Also to clear up "increased chance of drive failure", when we say "More chance of losing a drive" it's not that each drive is individually more likely to die, it's just statistics.

 

If a drive had a 10% failure rate, 1 drive would have a 10% chance of data loss. If you had 2 drives and either of them dying resulted in data loss, the chances of said data loss would be the chances drive A failed plus the chance that drive B failed given drive A didn't fail, or 10%+(90%*10%) = 19% chance of data loss, even though each drive still only has a 10% failure rate.

 

The statistics here are simplified, but hopefully that helps illustrate the concept. 

 

EDIT: also those numbers were for simple math, I'm not saying that RAID 0 has a 19% failure rate. also, drive failure should be modeled as a poisson process, not a set of Bernoulli trials. sue me statisticians.  

[KuJoe]

6 minutes ago, reniat said:

"I like raid arrays!"

This statement makes me laugh because of so much redundancy in it.  

[cptjackawesome]

8 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Yes, RAID0 has no redundancy. If you want redundancy and performance than RAID10 or RAID50 is what you want but you'll need at least 4 or 6 drives for that.

 

0 = Striped, no redundancy, best performance, all space usable, minimum 2 drives.

1 = Mirrored, redundant drives, lowest performance, half the space, requires even number of drives.

10 = Mirrored then striped, redundant drives, second best performance, half the space, requires even number of drives (min 4).

5 = Parity, N+1 redundancy, adequate performance with hardware RAID but software RAID will use your CPU for parity calculation, only 1 drive lost for parity bit, requires at least 3 drives.

50 = Parity + Striped, N+1 redundancy for each stripe, better performance than RAID5 (still uses CPU for parity calculation in software), 1 drive lost for parity bit per stripe, requires at least 6 drives.

 

And RAID6 and RAID60 is essentially RAID5 and RAID50 with an extra parity drive for N+2 redundancy.

 

Hope that helps break down the different RAID types easier.

It does, and I had done some reading up on raid configuration. Thank you. 

 

I understand the risk in doubling my failure rate, but they're brand new drives bought a month apart, and since my data is re-downloadable, I think it would be worth it to run them together through disk management. I'd like the simplicity of one drive and improved performance, since that 16gb combined cache could really improve load times for something like gta v. 

 

Thanks again everyone.