danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 Hi, I've just built a new computer for a Dept Head at one of our schools. He has 2 x 300GB SAS Drives in RAID 1 for his system drive. Would it be quicker to put them in RAID 0 or keep them in RAID 1? Im hoping for top scores on W7 Performance, what do you recon? D
stevenwba Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 Raid 0 is faster but depends how important that data stored on this machine, is stick to what you got, what is the spec of the rest of the machine?
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 Antec 900 Case Antec 650W PSU Asus P6T6 WS Revolution Mobo Intel i7 930 2.88Ghz 6GB Hyper-X 1866Mhz DDR3 Gigabyte GTS-250 2 x 300GB SAS 6GB/s HDD's RAID 1 It's a decent spec!
apeo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 As stevenwba says, Raid 0 should be quicker overall (read/write) but if any disk fails then you lose all data.
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 As stevenwba says, Raid 0 should be quicker overall (read/write) but if any disk fails then you lose all data. Yeah I understand the problems with RAID 0, I'm going to advise he sticks to RAID 1. I hope it gets good scores! D
Jamo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 If you want top scores should have gone SSD! What was the reason for SAS above SATA?
stevenwba Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 What was the reason for SAS above SATA? i was just about the ask that, also the dept head wants the good score?? my home pc atm is rocking 2.3 lol (: need to upgrade put that spec is insane for a school machine
flyinghaggis Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 What kind of price does a 300Gb SAS drive come in at these days? I've not looked at benckmarks but from seeing the performance of the (mirrored - RAID 1)SAS drives in our blade servers it looks like they'd be substantially quicker than a SATA drive. Would be interesting to see how they compare with solid state in terms of boot times/etc?
apeo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 Doesnt look like a bad build, in fact if the user is only going to use it for normal usage it seems above and beyond whats needed. Im sure the benchmark will come out well.
jamesreedersmith Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 Why does he need so much??? or is it just he pays the budget so gets what he *wants/needs* (although i doubt he needs that!!) THanks James
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 The guy just likes his gadgets and this is just another one. He already has a PC running SAS and has got exceptional performance from the drives already so decided this one should be SAS too. They rate at about £200 for one of these which is 15k rpm. I must admit they are very quick these SAS drives. He tried 2 x SSD 2.5" drives in a laptop that was uber quick lol but the drives did cost like £500 each! D
featured_spectre Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 2x SSD Drives (500GB ones if he can afford it!) set up in a RAID01 config, will be like lightning, plus if you lose the data from one drive, put a new one in and it gets rebuilt in superquick time
Jamo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 The guy just likes his gadgets and this is just another one. He already has a PC running SAS and has got exceptional performance from the drives already so decided this one should be SAS too. They rate at about £200 for one of these which is 15k rpm. I must admit they are very quick these SAS drives. He tried 2 x SSD 2.5" drives in a laptop that was uber quick lol but the drives did cost like £500 each! D [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs]YouTube- Samsung SSD Awesomeness[/ame] This is so the future though! Having a smaller SSD as an OS drive really makes the PC so responsive can always shift the user folders onto a RAID1 drive after. 1
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 This is so the future though! Having a smaller SSD as an OS drive really makes the PC so responsive can always shift the user folders onto a RAID1 drive after. Oh yeah it was like Sh*t of a shovel the laptop running SSD in RAID booted in like 2 seconds, we were impressed!
apeo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 The guy just likes his gadgets and this is just another one. He already has a PC running SAS and has got exceptional performance from the drives already so decided this one should be SAS too. They rate at about £200 for one of these which is 15k rpm. I must admit they are very quick these SAS drives. He tried 2 x SSD 2.5" drives in a laptop that was uber quick lol but the drives did cost like £500 each! D Yeah the price of SSD is way expensive and for very little storage space too. Man i cant even get a high spec pc to do high end work and someone is getting a good spec just because. Making the assumption here that this PC was school property.. is it? or is it the deputy's computer that your building?
steveg Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 Stretch the budget a bit more and get a third hard disk! - Looking at the spec that motherboard supports Raid 5, so you'd get the speed and some redundancy. Steve
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 Yeah the price of SSD is way expensive and for very little storage space too. Man i cant even get a high spec pc to do high end work and someone is getting a good spec just because. Making the assumption here that this PC was school property.. is it? or is it the deputy's computer that your building? It's a personal build for him purchased privately. Stretch the budget a bit more and get a third hard disk! - Looking at the spec that motherboard supports Raid 5, so you'd get the speed and some redundancy. Steve There are only 2 SAS connectors though so could not use SAS and RAID 5 would have been nice. Could buy a seperate card though. D
Jamo Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 (edited) In some circumstances RAID1 can be faster than RAID5 due to RAID5's increased overhead. Edited March 22, 2010 by Jamo my idiotness
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 In some circumstances RAID1 can be faster than RAID5 due to its increased overhead. You speak true words Jamo, I had this conversation with the head support guy at Fujitsu a few weeks back down in Bracknell, and he was saying that you shouldn't store your SQL log files on RAID 5 because it can slow the system down as it can't handle the throughput needed so its better to stick them on a RAID 0 or RAID 1. D
difinity Posted March 22, 2010 Posted March 22, 2010 The spec of your pc is similar to one i built at the weekend, apart from the one i built had a 80Gb intel SSD, it got a score of 7.5 in windows, mighty quick for under £200.
danrhodes Posted March 22, 2010 Author Posted March 22, 2010 Hmm im interested to see what this one gets then. Its guna get W7 x64 on it 2mz!
difinity Posted March 23, 2010 Posted March 23, 2010 My mistake, i doubled checked last night and it has a score of 7.7
danrhodes Posted March 23, 2010 Author Posted March 23, 2010 Its all done just need to run the score checker on it which I have forgot to run!
pwds Posted March 23, 2010 Posted March 23, 2010 Slightly OT, but am I right in thinking that RAID1 will give you faster read (especially with larger files) and RAID0 faster write? Does the actual relative change vary much with controllers as well, compared to having the same drives in a non array setup will the performance difference always be of the same magnitude? (Taking for example two PCI-E x 16 RAID cards so the bus bandwidth is constant)
Jamo Posted March 23, 2010 Posted March 23, 2010 RAID0 should be faster in most cases, RAID5 is supposed to be slower as it involves calculations of parity etc which RAID0 doesn't. RAID0 stripes data effectively storing one half on one physical media adn one half on the other. RAID10 is becoming more popular which is RAID1 volumes striped requires 4 disks min but has the best of both worlds.
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