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Fixong to Purchase M9700...Raid 0 or Raid 1 HDD

post #1 of 19
1/30/07 at 1:50pm
Thread Starter 
I'm fixing to purchase a M9700 from Alienware. Should I get Raid 0 or Raid 1 on the hard drives?
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post #2 of 19
1/30/07 at 1:53pm
The big question is: What do you plan to use the laptop for, and what kind of data do you plan to place on the hard drives?
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post #3 of 19
1/30/07 at 2:05pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shalamar
The big question is: What do you plan to use the laptop for, and what kind of data do you plan to place on the hard drives?

I will be using it to play games, use Quicken, and some photo work.
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post #4 of 19
1/30/07 at 2:17pm
Here's a better idea. Wait a few weeks and get Raid 0 on a m9750.
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post #5 of 19
1/30/07 at 5:07pm
RAID0 is called striping, it puts half the info on one drive, half on the other theoretically speeding up reading and writing, but for gaming it's not terribly advantageous. It will shorten load times a little as games are loaded into memory and run from there. It won't affect gameplay though...

RAID1 is called mirroring, so the same information gets recorded on both drives. This is good for sensitive data so if one drive fails, you still have the data on the other, but it uses lots of power as both drives are running all the time. Unless you're really concerned about your data, it's probably not worth the extra cost for RAID and a second drive.

I had RAID0 on my last desktop, and I found it didn't affect me much, so I disabled it as it's easier to deal with individual drives IMO...
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post #6 of 19
1/30/07 at 8:14pm
Hammer you strike quicker then a shark...

Cajun, I purchased my m9700 with a stripped array but however they sent it to me in a raid 1 setup which I changed myself to a raid 0. I found no real performance increase and so I have since dropped the raid and gone seperate with my drives and partitioned the C: drive for my windows install. Thing is you can order an m9700 and most likely the m9750 with just a single hard drive. If I were purchasing over again I would have gone with a 100gb hdd and purchased a seperate 7200rpm 60-80gb hdd from newegg as they have really good prices and set up my windows and games to run off from that drive and use the 100gb hdd which would probably have ended up being only a 5400rpm for pictures, music, backup files, and other odds. It really isn't worth the money to get raid setup through alienware as the m9700 comes with the raid drivers on the xp boot cd and it is really easy to set raid up if you want to do it yourself.

Simply put, just save a few $$$ and go with a single larger drive with the highest rpm cycle as you can always add another hdd down the line.

Quick edit: Alienware charges $106 for their cheapest raid option. That is 2 80gb hdds @5400rpm. This is what I have and my comp came with 2 fujitsu's. Newegg.com has 10 80gb hdd's ranging from $60-80 and the $80 is actually a lot more as the rest are all in the 60's. Almost forgot to mention that if you plan on doing raid yourself it would be very wise to get the same brand of hdd but it is necessary to get the same size hdd otherwise it will not work.
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post #7 of 19
1/30/07 at 9:15pm
RAID0 is great if you're doing lots of hard drive intensive work. File access, file sharing, uploading and downloading, and processes like rendering 3d images that use the hard drive a lot can really be sped up with RAID0. Unfortunatly for games it's not that big a boost. It is cool though...

Since AW doesn't give you the option to get two drives without RAID installed, I'd add a second matching drive myself. In fact I'm doing that myself. If you get the machine with RAID then decide you don't want it, your respawn disc will be worthless so you'll have to reinstall windows from scratch...

If you keep sensitive data, like for work or criminal activity, and losing that information would be devastating, RAID1 makes a lot of sense. If it's just so you don't lose your favorite porn... well now that I think of it...
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post #8 of 19
1/30/07 at 9:25pm
Hey Hammer, isn't that what you have an external HDD for?
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post #9 of 19
1/30/07 at 10:24pm
I'll agree with everyone also in that Raid 0 didn't give me any noticeable real world increase in performance that would warrant the additional risk of data loss. I'll probably set it up again though to test under Vista to see if there has been any improvements but I doubt I'll see any difference. It's a technology that gives many theoretical advantages but they don't translate to real world advantages under most computing circumstances.

There's a gaming article on Raid out there that tested load times and it pretty much said the same thing. Ah here it is. Good article worth reading. Here's the succinct consensus:

Quote:
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.
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post #10 of 19
1/30/07 at 10:25pm
Quote:
Hammer you strike quicker then a shark...
That's cause he is our resident SHARK! I've got 2x160GB 5400 HDs in my m9700 in RAID 0. Someday, I'll probably de-RAID them, but for now it's not a problem. I wanted larger capacity for photos, iTunes, and Video ... I use an external HD for backup, or network important files to my desktop. That said, I basically agree with what the guys above have said ... it's not that big of a time saver for most things, and it's easy enough to add another drive down the road (if budget is an issue). I like the idea of having two HDs in my notebook, but don't see a real advantage to RAID.
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post #11 of 19
1/31/07 at 12:09am
I had bad experiences with Raid 0. I constantly had hardware failures and my Raid array would constantly fail and not reconize one of the drives, before I found out how to initialize the array without rewriting the boot sector I could get back to windows with a simple reboot, but it was only a matter of time before they died.

I used Raid on my m7700. I have heard that battery performance can be reduced because of the extra power neeed to spin both disks... I opted for a single drive on my new m9700 just because of this.
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post #12 of 19
1/31/07 at 12:20am
I think RAID 0 is cool, but there really is no noticeable performance increase. Maybe slight, but not worth the extra complexity added to the system in terms of data integrity as was stated earlier. RAID 0 is usually most effective with file and web servers with tons of disk access from client machines.

I RAID 0 on a few systems here, but it was more for the wow factor.
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post #13 of 19
1/31/07 at 12:33am
How do you disable RAID? and Hammer what do you mean by the respawn disc is worthless if you disable RAID?

also, is there a significant difference between 5400rpm and 7200 rpm in access time, noise, energy consumption, and even laptop vibration?
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post #14 of 19
1/31/07 at 1:28am
blizard8, here are the directions for setting up Raid 0 also known as a stripping array found on the Alienware Support. It is actually pretty easy to follow the directions however I've noticed it is a little bit different then setting up a raid on the m9700, which I've done a couple of times both raid 0 and raid 1

http://4help.alienware.com/cgi-bin/a...i=&p_topview=1

As for the respawn disc not working if you disable raid, I think this is due to the respawn disc being an image of your hard drive before it leaves the alienware creation station. I had a little problem when I made a backup image of my raid 0 and something got messed up and I ended up just using my drives seperately and dissabled the raid. I could not load that backup file since it was set up for a raid array and not for seperate or a single hdd.
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post #15 of 19
1/31/07 at 1:42am
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post #16 of 19
1/31/07 at 2:05am
Ok, now that everyone has already said this, I'm going to say it again, only later on in the topic & look really stupid (like I didn't read the other posts before posting)

But for the sake of agreement - RAID 0 is way over-rated. My m9700 was supposed to be in RAID 0, but they screwed it up and it came in a messed up config. I called AW & reformatted to RAID 0. I had installed all my productivity software and several games before I discovered the goof up.

Here is the important part - after the reformat to RAID 0 - I DID NOT NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCE - AT ALL!!!

If there was a difference, it was so minute that it was unnoticable. I haven't experienced any of the supposed instability of RAID 0 - but its not worth the risk of data loss for the nominal speed boost

Oh yeah, and you should just wait for the m9750 - if you don't wanna, I will sell you my m9700 at a good price (I need the money to save up for my m9750)
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post #17 of 19
2/1/07 at 9:51pm
If you disable a RAID configuration, how do the 2 HDs function? Do they work as though it was one HD of their combined capacities?
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post #18 of 19
2/1/07 at 10:32pm
I agree with what someone else said wait for the m9750
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post #19 of 19
2/1/07 at 10:41pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by blizard8
If you disable a RAID configuration, how do the 2 HDs function? Do they work as though it was one HD of their combined capacities?

No, when you disable raid, two hd's will show up separately under my computer. You can partition them also if you want.

With RAID, the two drives show up as one, and you can partition the array, but it supposedly slows everything down...

That's why you have to reload windows. In raid, windows is split between the two drives, without raid it's only on one drive.

I set up my hd's like this:

First partition (c), 15G for windows. The rest of the first drive (d) I use for programs and games. The second drive I make a small 5G partition (e) for the pagefile, then use the rest of the second drive (f) for storage like mp3's, patches, vids etc... Two physical hard drives, four partitions.
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