Raid or two 120gb hard drives

[Gplracer]

I just got another 120gb hard drive. Should I run it in raid with my other 120gb hard drive or as a seperate drive for capturing video? I am losing frames now when capturing to mpeg2 with my leadtek expert. I have a fast system as seen below Thanks!

Athlon 1700+ (215x11=2365mhz)
512mb or Corsair DDR
WD 120gb HD with 8mb buffer
GF4 4200

[kirky99]

I had a RAID setup and I couldn't wait to break the array.

I didn't feel the speed was worth it. Mostly worried that one drive would go and that would be the end of it. 240G worth of stuff is a lot to lose.

That's just my take

[epo]

2 separate drives are much better - disk to disk copying (edit, multiplex etc) is much faster than copying inside array.

[andkiich]

I've been running a RAID on all my machines for the last 3 years, and I wouldn't use anything else.

My next upgrade wil be a Serial ATA RAID.

I definitely can tell the speed/performance difference.

[redwudz]

If you are planning to use RAID0 as your boot drive, I wouldn't recommend it. Had too many problems with my setup that way. I use RAID0 as a seperate AV drive and it is quite a bit faster than my boot drive. I never put anything on my RAID drive that I can't afford to lose. It has crashed occasionaly, taking all the data with it, and I have had drive failures, losing data there also. If you are doing capturing from a video card, it works well. Used for video editing or encoding, I'm not so sure it's much faster than two individual drives. I run a 80G boot and two 80G (160G) in a RAID0 setup, along with another 80G for backup.

[rlhartman]

I don't RAID any of my drives. But I DO optimize things for top performance in an ATAPI (EIDE) environment. Most important is to run each drive on its own dedicated interface. Set the drive to master, put it at the end of the cable, and make certain it's the only device on that cable. This permits the device to run without channel access conflicts.

I have six drives in my main workstation (four hard drives and two optical drives) and every one has its own dedicated interface and cable. This obviously requires six EIDE interfaces: two on the motherboard itself, plus two on each of two EIDE PCI interface cards. Such cards are available off-the-shelf at places like CompUSA for ~$30 or from eBay for ~$10.

As far as speed goes, I've built SCSI disk subsystems with a (nearly) unlimited budget over the years... and this dedicated-EIDE interface approach is frankly just as fast as any SCSI environment I've ever built or seen. The SCSI environment is better in a multiuser server environment (such as an app server, database server, online server, etc.) but for single-user workstations the dedicated-EIDE interface approach is as good or better. And it uses vastly less expensive components, too.

Be sure to use at least ATA-100 (aka UDMA-100) drives with at least 8MB buffers, plus the proper 80-pin ATA-100 cables, and make certain your operating system actually sees the drives as UDMA-100 devices. You'll be delighted with the results.

Hope this helps!

[rallynavvie]

Why isn't this in the computer forum?

If those are your only two drives then keeping them seperate is best. Striping your boot drive is just asking for trouble, and it is true that read/write to the same disk (even a striper) will be slower than reading from one and writing to the other. I set up two 80GB drives in RAID 0 for a video capture and scratch drive but it didn't help me lose any less frames. Regular ATA100 works fine for capture, look elsewhere for the reason for dropped frames. I had my 80GB array corrupt a stripe once and that was the end of RAID for me. The two drives are far more useful to me seperated, though I may put the OS on one and mirror it (RAID 1) with the other since that would be kind of cool. IMO the only useful RAID level is any with mirroring. If you want fast go invest in some U320 SCSI equipment