Help with Raid0

[Mero_de]

Hello everyone,

i have a ddr2 MB, support ACHI but no Raid options in the Bios.

ive read about Raid0 and intrested to give it a try.

i seen two ways to do it , either from the Bios which i cant do or a raid software like using windows or some Applications

the question is, should the two HDDs be from the same manufacture and same size or it dosent matter ?

since theres no raid options in the baios, would the software method be the way to go or it will not work either ways?

 

[TechBruhE]

doesn't matter when you use windows to apply a spanned array it will address the smaller storage of the two, on both. so if you had a 250 and a 500gb hdd, it would address it as two 250gb drives. really simple. on win10 just do a cortana search for create and format hard disk partitions. should only take a few seconds to initialize.
a perk to software raid 0 that I've found, is even on a fresh install of windows, 90% of the time windows will recognize the drives you had set up in software raid automatically and you wont have to reformat or anything. saved me a lot of time not having to redownload my steam library.

also windows refers to raid 0 as a spanned array within the drive partitioning tool.

[Mero_de]

awesome so just to make sure i understood well , although the motherboard dosent support raid and without having a raid controller the raid will simply work using that windows utility right ?

yeah i actually have 1 SSHD that where the windows is installed.

the other two HDDS are 250 and 320 so the windows will see those two as 500

[Mero_de]

thanks alot

[TechBruhE]

yeah the total size will be 500, it will use 250 on each. yeah doesn't matter about your mobo, windows will use it as raid in within windows. you can raid multiple external drives too, whether theyre usb or usb hdd's.
sshd? lol im sorry.

[Oshino Shinobu]

11 minutes ago, shawnhovde said:

doesn't matter when you use windows to apply a spanned array it will address the smaller storage of the two, on both. so if you had a 250 and a 500gb hdd, it would address it as two 250gb drives. really simple. on win10 just do a cortana search for create and format hard disk partitions. should only take a few seconds to initialize.
a perk to software raid 0 that I've found, is even on a fresh install of windows, 90% of the time windows will recognize the drives you had set up in software raid automatically and you wont have to reformat or anything. saved me a lot of time not having to redownload my steam library.

also windows refers to raid 0 as a spanned array within the drive partitioning tool.

Windows refers to RAID 0 as a striped array/volume, not a spanned array/volume. Spanned is closer to JBOD than RAID. 

[TechBruhE]

np.

[Mero_de]

i hope the raido setup can help to improve performance of my virtual machine..

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Mero_de said:

i hope the raido setup can help to improve performance of my virtual machine..

If it's two HDDs, it can make a fairly noticeable difference, particularly for sequential read/writes. Just wouldn't advise storing anything important on it. RAID 0 significantly increases the chances of losing data due to drive failure, as if one of the drive fails, you lose all data on the array.

 

Personally, I'm not a fan of RAID 0, there's normally way more downsides than benefits to using it. It's technically not even RAID.

[Mero_de]

do you guys think that the performance is comparable to an SSD? 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Mero_de said:

do you guys think that the performance is comparable to an SSD? 

No. It's way less responsive, an SSD's random read/write performance is significantly better. Depending on the drives, you may be able to match an SSD for sequential read/writes with large files though, but that's typically not something that everyday use will utilise much.

[Mero_de]

yeah ill just use that space for VM-Ware  and some games.. nothing important , plus i haven't had a drive failure in my entire life lol

[Mero_de]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

No. It's way less responsive, an SSD's random read/write performance is significantly better. Depending on the drives, you may be able to match an SSD for sequential read/writes with large files though, but that's typically not something that everyday use will utilise much.

intressting. do you recommanded to put windows cash files on the raid ? when i run windows server i run out of  ram real quick lol  

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Mero_de said:

yeah ill just use that space for VM-Ware  and some games.. nothing important , plus i haven't had a drive failure in my entire life lol

They can come in batches

 

I've had three drives fail on me in the last year. Two of which had been running in a 4TB RAID 0 array for most of their lives, so all of that data went when one drive failed. Luckily it went shortly after I finished moving all of my data over to a newly build NAS, so I didn't actually lose any files. 

[TechBruhE]

5 minutes ago, Mero_de said:

do you guys think that the performance is comparable to an SSD? 

I've met a lot of people who think ssd's are a bunch of bs. they all seem to say the same thing, why would I pay more money for less space?

that's not why ssd's are a big deal. speed, and latency.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Mero_de said:

intressting. do you recommanded to put windows cash files on the raid ? when i run windows server i run out of  ram real quick lol  

Not really, no. Best solution would be to get a small SSD (or a large one, if you can afford it) and run Windows off that. 

 

Like I said before, the main difference you'll see with RAID 0 on HDDs is sequential read/writes. Access times and random read/write performance isn't affected much, and can actually get worse, depending on file and stripe sizing. You wouldn't see much, or any difference by putting them on the RAID 0 array

[Mero_de]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

They can come in batches

 

I've had three drives fail on me in the last year. Two of which had been running in a 4TB RAID 0 array for most of their lives, so all of that data went when one drive failed. Luckily it went shortly after I finished moving all of my data over to a newly build NAS, so I didn't actually lose any files. 

haha hard luck, backup is important for sure. i usualy have everything important stored on my Laptop.. this PC is just for games and normal use..

[Mero_de]

sequential read/writes.. i need to understand that first.

sequential read/writes and Access times and random read/write performance.. if you can explaing those in easy words with examples ill be thankful 

[Mero_de]

what dose a game and vm-ware stuff use at most ? would that be the read/write or the access time ?

[Mero_de]

nvm, thanks alot guys, good talk.cheers

[Oshino Shinobu]

23 minutes ago, Mero_de said:

sequential read/writes.. i need to understand that first.

sequential read/writes and Access times and random read/write performance.. if you can explaing those in easy words with examples ill be thankful 

So, sequential read/writes (or just sequential performance, the read/writes isn't particularly important) refers to data that is accessed in order, one bit after the other. Typically, this occurs when working with one large file. Such as copying a large file to another drive, into RAM and so on. For example, if you import a large video file into a video editing program, that would be using sequential performance. 

 

Random performance is for data that is scattered, and not in sequence. It makes up the majority of everyday use for most people. Things like booting, OS use, loading games, loading programs, copying lots of small files and such all use random performance. 

 

Access times are basically how quickly a drive can respond to a request for data. Think about network ping when playing a game online, it's basically a measure latency. 

 

One of the main reasons SSDs are so much faster than HDDs when it comes to random read/writes and access times is due to the mechanical nature of HDDs. They have to physically move the actuator(s) to the location of the next bit of data. There's the initial delay to get to the first bit of data, then the delays in-between when moving to the next. You can see how much this makes a difference by first copying something like a 5GB movie file on the HDD, then copying 5GB of jpg files on the same HDD. The pictures will copy painfully slow compared to the video file. 

 

SSDs don't have physically moving parts, so physical data location doesn't matter. It means it doesn't have the same initial delay, or time to wait in-between fetching bits of data.

 

There's also the matter of data fragmentation. On HDDs, data naturally becomes fragmented as space is emptied and re-filled and data needs to be split to fit completely. If an HDD is getting slower, you can defragment (defrag) it through Windows to try to move data into a more organised and less spread out way, improving performance. SSDs don't get fragmented data (or rather, it doesn't matter), so performance doesn't drop in the same manner and they don't need defragging (defragging is actually bad for the SSD's health as it uses up write cycles on the SSD unnecessarily). Instead, TRIM can be run on SSDs (Windows will automatically run TRIM if you optimise an SSD and defrag if it's an HDD. Or at least, Windows 7 and up will) which is generally considered the defragmentation equivalent for SSDs. It basically tells the SSD which blocks of data are considered to be unused, so the SSD can completely wipe them, allowing for data to be written to the blocks without the SSD preserving any data on the blocks, reducing the total amount of writes required and increasing write throughput, so it improves the life and performance of the SSD. 

 

Windows will often run optimisation (defrag on HDD and TRIM on SSDs) automatically, so it's not something you always have to remember to do yourself. Though, you can set up an optimisation cycle to tell the system to perform the operations at set intervals. 

[Mero_de]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

So, sequential read/writes (or just sequential performance, the read/writes is particularly important) refers to data that is accessed in order, one bit after the other. Typically, this occurs when working with one large file. Such as copying a large file to another drive, into RAM and so on. For example, if you import a large video file into a video editing program, that would be using sequential performance. 

 

Random performance is for data that is scattered, and not in sequence. It makes up the majority of everyday use for most people. Things like booting, OS use, loading games, loading programs, copying lots of small files and such all use random performance. 

 

Access times are basically how quickly a drive can respond to a request for data. Think about network ping when playing a game online, it's basically a measure latency. 

 

One of the main reasons SSDs are so much faster than HDDs when it comes to random read/writes and access times is due to the mechanical nature of HDDs. They have to physically move the actuator(s) to the location of the next bit of data. There's the initial delay to get to the first bit of data, then the delays in-between when moving to the next. You can see how much this makes a difference by first copying something like a 5GB movie file on the HDD, then copying 5GB of jpg files on the same HDD. The pictures will copy painfully slow compared to the video file. 

 

SSDs don't have physically moving parts, so physical data location doesn't matter. It means it doesn't have the same initial delay, or time to wait in-between fetching bits of data.

 

There's also the matter of data fragmentation. On HDDs, data naturally becomes fragmented as space is emptied and re-filled and data needs to be split to fit completely. If an HDD is getting slower, you can defragment (defrag) it through Windows to try to move data into a more organised and less spread out way, improving performance. SSDs don't get fragmented data (or rather, it doesn't matter), so performance doesn't drop in the same manner and they don't need defragging (defragging is actually bad for the SSD's health as it uses up write cycles on the SSD unnecessarily). Instead, TRIM can be run on SSDs (Windows will automatically run TRIM if you optimise an SSD and defrag if it's an HDD. Or at least, Windows 7 and up will) which is generally considered the defragmentation equivalent for SSDs. It basically tells the SSD which blocks of data are considered to be unused, so the SSD can completely wipe them, allowing for data to be written to the blocks without the SSD preserving any data on the blocks, reducing the total amount of writes required and increasing write throughput, so it improves the life and performance of the SSD. 

 

Windows will often run optimisation (defrag on HDD and TRIM on SSDs) automatically, so it's not something you always have to remember to do yourself. Though, you can set up an optimisation cycle to tell the system to perform the operations at set intervals. 

thanks a lot man, very informative.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Mero_de said:

thanks a lot man, very informative.

No problem. Main thing to note is that most things that you'll interpret as a system's speed and responsiveness is going to be based on random performance and access times, which is why SSDs make such a big difference when the OS is stored on them. 

[Mero_de]

@Oshino Shinobu, just wanna make sure that i know everything before i start the raid0, i have one more question.

Besides a drive failure what can kill a Raid 0 array?

 Besides a backup and not having important stuff on it ,What to do and what NOT to do in order to keep Raid array safe and protecting it from failing ?

btw i just bought a 250g SSD for the OS and the other 2 HDDS will work in a Raid0 array.

 

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Mero_de said:

@Oshino Shinobu, just wanna make sure that i know everything before i start the raid0, i have one more question.

Besides a drive failure what can kill a Raid 0 array?

 Besides a backup and not having important stuff on it ,What to do and what NOT to do in order to keep Raid array safe and protecting it from failing ?

btw i just bought a 250g SSD for the OS and the other 2 HDDS will work in a Raid0 array.

 

 

With hardware or motherboard/BIOS RAID, if the RAID controller dies or encounters an error, it can corrupt the data on the array, or the array configuration itself. That's not so much of an issue with software RAID (ie. Through Windows) as there's no physical hardware to fail. That said, if you encounter a bad case of data corruption of the OS, it could affect the array, though I haven't really heard about that happening much. 

 

Keeping the array from failing is mostly down to putting the drives in as good a condition as you can. So make sure they get a decent amount of airflow, mount them properly and securely and try to space them away from each other to avoid the vibrations from each drive affecting the other. If your HDD mounts have rubber mounting points, or something similar, use them. Vibration dampening can make a massive difference to a drive's life span.