NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Alienware Notebook Forums › Alienware Area-51 and Aurora Notebooks › Poll: GET RAID or NO RAID - your input is requested
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

Poll: GET RAID or NO RAID - your input is requested - Page 2

Poll Results: GET RAID or NO RAID?

 
  • 52% (28)
    Yes, get RAID!
  • 47% (25)
    No, don't get RAID!
53 Total Votes  
post #21 of 37
1/23/05 at 5:39am
As most of you know by now controlers and hardrives have come along way . chance of failure is so small . just be sure to always use top name brand parts .1 note about raid 0 as far as wear on a drive goes 2 drives are sharing the work of 1 so wear on each is reduced.. Raid 0 may have been risky in the past but with todays technology its pretty much mainstream now.
Reply
Reply
post #22 of 37
1/23/05 at 6:00am
when i switched to raid 0 it improved my 3dmark03 score by less than 50 points and there was virtually no difference in loading times, its really only usefull if you have 2 smaller drives and want them to act as one bigger for some reason (for games). Although i imagine it might give a bigger performance boost in things such as photoshop etc
edit: and i'm using a neo plat2 w/ hardware raid
Reply
Reply
post #23 of 37
1/23/05 at 6:35am
Thread Starter 

changing configurations

Quote:
Originally Posted by venom8599
And really, you if you order RAID 0 and later get uncomfortable with it, you can set it up to run as 2 single drives or even RAID 1. Plus most (if not all) of the cost of putting it on your notebook that make it more than a single drive is just the cost of the extra HDD itself.
How easy is it to change RAID configurations? Or, upgrade from single drive to RAID array?
Reply
Reply
post #24 of 37
1/23/05 at 7:50am
you have to reinstall windows when you change raid configs, but its as easy as plugging in another drive and hitting f1 to install the raid drivers when you install windows if your doing that
Reply
Reply
post #25 of 37
1/23/05 at 10:17am
Quote:
Originally Posted by taliosfalcon
you have to reinstall windows when you change raid configs, but its as easy as plugging in another drive and hitting f1 to install the raid drivers when you install windows if your doing that
I think it's F6, not F1.
I had a RAID0 config on my old desktop. I got a little speed boost (about 10%), but then one of the drives failed. Seems IBM made a whole batch of bad drives and they pretty much all failed. I'm now a bit wary of RAID0.
Reply
Reply
post #26 of 37
1/23/05 at 4:51pm
this argument is like telling someone not to buy a 12 cylinder engine because there are more parts involved and it will have the tendency to fail more but they cylinders dont have to work as hard to achieve the same goal so therefore they can last longer i have yet to have a HDD fail its not way back when when all this was new and u had to worry about it i mean if u dont act like a retard ur drives wont fail ive had the same computer for about 4-5years and its ben on for almost the entire time with the exception of a few vactations but it stays on ALL nite all day and everything and my HDD or anything hasnt fail for anything
Reply
Reply
post #27 of 37
1/23/05 at 9:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flatulatta
this argument is like telling someone not to buy a 12 cylinder engine because there are more parts involved and it will have the tendency to fail more but they cylinders dont have to work as hard to achieve the same goal so therefore they can last longer i have yet to have a HDD fail its not way back when when all this was new and u had to worry about it i mean if u dont act like a retard ur drives wont fail ive had the same computer for about 4-5years and its ben on for almost the entire time with the exception of a few vactations but it stays on ALL nite all day and everything and my HDD or anything hasnt fail for anything
This isn't much of an argument. If you knew anything about the subject, you'd know that most drives fail at power-up. Keeping them spinning the whole time is the best way to prolong their lives. Anyone buying a 7700 is likely to be moving fairly regularly and therefore spinning up and down the drives.

The point is, the RAID 0 gain is pretty negligable so why take the risk.
Reply
Reply
post #28 of 37
1/24/05 at 2:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by cjdshaw
I think it's F6, not F1.
I had a RAID0 config on my old desktop. I got a little speed boost (about 10%), but then one of the drives failed. Seems IBM made a whole batch of bad drives and they pretty much all failed. I'm now a bit wary of RAID0.
Well even without RAID 0 then the drive would've still failed and you'd have lost the data on it anyway. Can't really blame a bad batch of IBM drives on your RAID array...

Quote:
Originally Posted by T4sys
How easy is it to change RAID configurations? Or, upgrade from single drive to RAID array?
For setting up the RAID array from a 2 drive setup, taliosfalcon was pretty much right (though it is F6, not F1), although you also have to set up the array before installing Windows; mostly these days through a boot ROM (at least, that's how it is on a desktop, not sure about lappies, never owned one with RAID support).

When coming from a single drive setup you will of course need to buy and install a 2nd HDD of the same size, spindle speed, and interface (best bet is to use same brand and model). Then you just set up the array the same as before.
Reply
Reply
post #29 of 37
1/24/05 at 5:07am
Thread Starter 

split-decision

wow, I can't believe how close this poll is... it's nearly a split-decision.

On the other hand… I'm not sure what gets a greater argument about RAID 0... that it's too risky because you may lose all your data if one drive crashes, or whether or not it actually increases performance.

What are the chances of a single drive crashing vs. an array crashing… or chances of dropping your system and damaging it… or worse, chances of your system getting stolen? In any case, I think it always makes sense whatever your configuration to at least backup your data in order to eliminate any risk of losing it.

So that leaves increased performance, does RAID work or not?

It seems to come down to two words... it depends. I'm sure it does but it depends on what types of applications you're running vs. your system configurations and types of hardware installed.

It will be even more interesting to see what types of hard drives we'll be testing next.
Reply
Reply
post #30 of 37
1/28/05 at 7:03am
Leaving aside drive reliability, if ANY part of my system fails so I can't boot, I can just whip out my drives, put them in another machine and keep working. If you have RAID0, you have to find another machine that has the same controller. Can be a problem if you can't afford down-time.
Reply
Reply
post #31 of 37
1/28/05 at 7:23am
The big thing for anyone worried about data loss in raid or not make sure you have a routine backup method. Drives typically do not have a higher failure rate in a raid setup anymore then they do in a standard setup. I have several servers and desktops at work that have raid 0 and raid 5/6. Some of these machines are 6 years old. I have had machine under a year fail and some still running with raid for years. As always it is all mechanical (hard drives) and some last longer than others. Typically on a daily use for the average user a raid setup will not be notcied. Heavy video editing or the like you will shave some times off but generally not enough for the home user to notice...
Reply
Reply
post #32 of 37
1/28/05 at 9:27pm
I'll chime in, Venom has it right. No matter what RAID level you're running or even if you're running no RAID, get yourself in the habit of BACKING UP. Garbage in/garbage out as the old addage goes applies the same to RAID0 as it does to RAID1. Now, that said, I run RAID0 on my lappy (cuz it's under warranty and I back up all the time) and I run RAID1 on my main system (cuz I don't want to take the downtime hit for a failure, and I back up all the time).

My reasining for choosing RAID 0 in my 7700?? SEXAH!!! you wouldn't believe how my co-worker's eyes pop outta their heads when I say it has a built in RAID. heheh

-rick

oh and for those who think hard drives don't fail? WRONG! I happen to manage 15,000 or so of them and several fail daily.
Reply
Reply
post #33 of 37
1/28/05 at 11:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by hitekvoop
oh and for those who think hard drives don't fail? WRONG! I happen to manage 15,000 or so of them and several fail daily.

Geeze man, do you work in a data center full of Dell's or something? We have seven floors of hard drives on three different sea baords and we don't loose that many. Some of our DMX systems have gone a full year without a flashing disk.
Reply
Reply
post #34 of 37
1/29/05 at 11:52am
The reason I think I want a RAID 0 configuration is because I am pretty hard on my disk. I'm a software developer and I often have a lot going on at once (so it’s not gaming performance I’m really concerned about). For example, I often run Oracle on my laptop during development, and this is in conjunction with my IDE, application server, MQ Series, and database utility. I also use a lot of RAM (I'm almost always near 1 GB even without running Oracle), and for some reason Windows XP seems to want to swap to disk even when I haven't used it all (sigh). Disk swap happens all of the time for me (though whatever I get next will have 2GB of RAM) and I want to wait less for that.

Also, though I want at least 120GB of disk (probably more like 160), I hate having a C and D drive for my disks. I really prefer having one large drive (virtual or not). It makes things much easier to manage for me, and there's much less wasted space. At least that was my experience in the past for desktops with two drives.

Anyway, I've found this a very interesting thread. Thanks to everyone for this discussion.
Reply
Reply
post #35 of 37
1/29/05 at 3:30pm
I say go with Raid 0. Don't get it with performance increases in mind; get it if you like the idea of both your HD's showing up as 1 and then making a partition from that if you'd like. I personally like the idea of having my 2 HD's be as one in windows. Yes I realize that the performance and loss of data increase really don't make sense but what do you do. I mean your HD's now could go bad and you'd loose everything anyway.
Reply
Reply
post #36 of 37
1/31/05 at 9:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Time-Pilot
Geeze man, do you work in a data center full of Dell's or something? We have seven floors of hard drives on three different sea baords and we don't loose that many. Some of our DMX systems have gone a full year without a flashing disk.
That's pretty funny, while we have some dells lying around, mainly I manage Clariion's. At least they get fixed automagically by the little EMC gnomes.

oh, and I never have to actually go to the datacenters That's what console servers and on-site datacenter monkeys are for
Reply
Reply
post #37 of 37
2/1/05 at 11:52am
I feel for ya man, we have ton's of Clariion's CX700's manily with Celerra front ends. Started installing them last year after our Symmetrix leases ran out. Damn low buck Clariion's, only time we get DMX now is for SQL clusters.

We also have data center monkeys, we call them "Tape Operators." They are union, and if I so much as unplug a nic cable here I can get a grivence filed against me! It's a weird world for sure.
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Alienware Notebook Forums › Alienware Area-51 and Aurora Notebooks › Poll: GET RAID or NO RAID - your input is requested