Introduction to hard drive technology

you state that RAID0 allows you to get into your system more quickly, but have you taken into account the not inconsiderable time that the areca bios takes to load.

While I don't doubt that windows loads up a bit quicker once you get past POST, the areca takes at least 10 secs to fire up (does the A8N32 have the same cold-boot problem as the A8N Premium? as that doubles the time again)

I don't know about you, but my windows load-up time (on a single raptor) is lower than the areca bios on its own. Perhaps if your load-time is that high enough to see benefit from it, something other than the disk subsystem is at fault.

I recall when SATA first hit the market.

It was billed as the next great thing for server environments. They had no intention of marketing it toward desktop environments.

If the article states currently, we have no application nor "task" that can saturate the bandwidth provided by the ATA133 interface, I fully believe SATA is the Mercedes S-Class of the computer world.

Sure it has more bells and whistles than ATA1xx but do ya really need that?

Oh and SATA drives are dirt cheap when compared to ATA drives.

I actually think this was a good article. I especially liked the NCQ description and tables.

Now, for the random opinion of OneSeventeen:
SCSI is faster/better for server usage, but for the same price you can have tons more SATA drives ready for when one drives fails.

At work we are buying a cheap rackmount Dell fileserver with RAID 5 + hot spare with about 1TB of usable storage space (6 250GB SATA drives) and a reduntant power supply for less than $3,500.00 USD including Server 2003. And for less than $500 we can have a full set of spare drives. (of course we'd be getting the Dell 3 year warranty anyway, so not like we'll need more than a few spares for emergency situations.)

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad
you state that RAID0 allows you to get into your system more quickly, but have you taken into account the not inconsiderable time that the areca bios takes to load.

While I don't doubt that windows loads up a bit quicker once you get past POST, the areca takes at least 10 secs to fire up (does the A8N32 have the same cold-boot problem as the A8N Premium? as that doubles the time again)

I don't know about you, but my windows load-up time (on a single raptor) is lower than the areca bios on its own. Perhaps if your load-time is that high enough to see benefit from it, something other than the disk subsystem is at fault.

No idea what that cold boot issue is though. Maybe I'm lucky enough not to have one that has it.

I can't fault for that particular point about what seems like an unreasonable amount of time for the Areca BIOS to finish it's diags, but 5 seconds for the Areca to POST and 5 seconds for it's default delay before firing up wasn't that much slower than some of the Conroe rigs I've seen at the LAN--then again, maybe they have their boxes configured badly, and the Areca is just a turtle. As soon as their machines get past the POST, the WinXP loading screen sits there (and they have Raptor's too). As for mine, the WinXP loading screen might get to show 3 blue boxes, if any, then it's black for less than a second and then showing the welcome screen. Where I lose time to the Areca BIOS POST, I more than make up the difference in the XP loading time.

The Tweakers review on cache sizes, # of drives used, and which RAID in use showed dramatic differences over a single drive. Areca's FAQs point out a few performance graphs on # of drives in a RAID and the increase in performance (I believe they have the graphed results up to 16+ hard drives).

I would like to see up-to-date tests and usage like all of this, but with the BT comprehensive, qualitative and exhaustive technique.

OneSeventeen: SCSI is a different strategy but defeats the actual philosophy of what RAID stands for; as in I for Inexpensive?

And the recent research by the likes of Google and others seem to point out that MTBF and actual failure is specific to a brand and model rather than an interface and the environment the drive sits in.

YMMV

While we're on the topic of disabling NCQ/TCQ for better performance, you can disable read caching as well since that just slows things up for desktop users.

yah I maintain my point that as a sinle user on a tight budget I got out of the raid game, it was nice having 2 raptors in Raid 0, but with ever subsequent generation of raptor they double the space and the perfomance was better than that of 2 of the previous iterations in raid 0, I suppose if I REALLY had money I would get 2 150gb raptors in RAID 0 but just 1, 150raptor is more than enough for my OS/ gaming drive. I figure that once you get the higher end performance drive for gaming/ general work. In this case a 150gb raptor more or less everything else is impractical overkill in price to perfomance, ala I would rather spend the extra $$ on a better processor or doubling my ram, areas where I could see a more remarkable performance increase. Although this is just my opinion and RAID is not for everyone or everything but can offer a perfomance increase

Originally Posted by metarinka
yah I maintain my point that as a sinle user on a tight budget I got out of the raid game, it was nice having 2 raptors in Raid 0, but with ever subsequent generation of raptor they double the space and the perfomance was better than that of 2 of the previous iterations in raid 0, I suppose if I REALLY had money I would get 2 150gb raptors in RAID 0 but just 1, 150raptor is more than enough for my OS/ gaming drive. I figure that once you get the higher end performance drive for gaming/ general work. In this case a 150gb raptor more or less everything else is impractical overkill in price to perfomance, ala I would rather spend the extra $$ on a better processor or doubling my ram, areas where I could see a more remarkable performance increase. Although this is just my opinion and RAID is not for everyone or everything but can offer a perfomance increase

Heh, even though oddly enough, this StorageReview tells a less than perfect tale you'll notice that the 74GB Raptor and the 150GB Raptor seem to take the lead spot for some and not for others. A RAID with either of them, will be faster than a single drive with either of them. When the gaming enthusiast likes to push the envelope, just having the best performance in one area won't equate to the better performance in another--the goal would be to have the best performance across the board, or else why would one want to frequent sites and their forums like BT?

I agree with you, RAID is not for everyone. And you'll find me looking to increase the performance for my whole gaming box, since the overall picture of the best gaming machine will eliminate the excuse that I got my butt kicked because my hardware sucked. :)