Need some advice?

[SLICK RICK]

I am in the process of building and needed some advice. I have spent alot of money so far and I dont want to mess up anything.

This is what I have:
2x200GB WD hard drives
P4 2.8GHz
Asus P4P800 Deluxe MB
Lite On DVD-Rom
Lite On CD-RW
ATI 9600 Pro
Sony Floppy Drive
Geil 1GB PC-3200
Thermaltake Xaser III Case

What my question is "How should I have my hard drives and disc drives set up if I have (which I dont but maybe will get soon) 2 more hard drives and a internal DVD-RW for a total of 4 hard drives and 3 disc drives.

Here is a link to my motherboard
http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4P800%20Deluxe&langs=01

Thanks in advance.

SLICK RICK

[Faustus]

Put at least 2 of the like drives into a Raid1 for some fast striped action. Then use an 8meg cache drive as the boot drive. Thats what I'm planning to do.

[arcorob]

Oh ...I am hurt. I answered this and you asked again anyway !!! Oh the pain the pain.LOL

Like I had said,

Primary IDE 2 drives (C and D)
Secondary IDE - Internal DVD writer (cant add anything else because you cant mix anything with a DVD rw except a DVD rom or a CDRW (cant put a hard drive on that line is what I meanT)

The other 2 hard drives, attach to the VIA controller onboard. If you dont do the RAID setup, it will treat them as JBOD (just a binch of disks)

Hope this helps........ouch ouch ouch.LOL

[SquirrelDip]

I agree with flaystus - pick up another drive to use for you boot, a 60 or 80Gb with 8Mb cache can be purchased pretty cheap. Creating a RAID disk may be overkill from most of the reviews I've read but it may be favorable to have your two 200's as a single drive.

[SLICK RICK]

Arcorob,

I have been PMing you but got no response, I should have the rest of my things tomorrow and was getting nervous because there is still much I dont understand.

SLICK RICK

[Faustus]

I've been doing some playing around recently, especially with DVDMaestro and found that faster hard drives make a HUGE difference in times. Same with most program that require you to rip to hard drive first. Data on a striped drive, compile out to the main drive then burn, things move REAL fast that way. When I unraided my Deskstar (non 8mb cache drives) I noticed a pretty big difference with things that access alot of hard drive. Soon as I can afford another 80+ 8mb cache drive I'm reraiding them for some goodness.

[SLICK RICK]

The two 200GB hard drives have a 8MB cache.

Rob, check your messages.

SLICK RICK

[rallynavvie]

RAID isn't all it's cracked up to be on ATA drives. I did 2 80GB (w/ 8MB cache) drives and didn't see enough of an increase to make the risk of 160GB worth of data loss if I lost a stripe worthwile. You'd really be asking for it with 2 200GB HDDs, that'd be a loss of 400GB

How often does this happen? Quite a lot surprisingly. If you don't have a UPS plan on losing your RAID drive. During the occasional brown-outs I get at home I had to reformat my RAID drive three times. Also if your machine freezes in the middle of a write it'll corrupt a stripe.

I saw in increase of read/write performance of maybe 50%. You'd think it would be a 100% increase over the single drive. No, if you want fast hard drives you'd be better off getting SATA or U160 SCSI or better. My SCSI drives may not be able to hold much data but they pretty much spank my IDE drives for transfer rates. 'Tis true was flaystus said regarding Maestro, I do compiles from one SCSI drive to the other and it'll take about 5 minutes. Strongest part of those drives is seek times of under 4ms. Ever play a video game and get sick of wierd things happening because the game can't access its files quick enough? I run Battlefield and Freelancer off one of my SCSI drives. Only downfall to SCSI is it's obscenely expensive when comparing storage to IDE counterparts. I think the reliability and performance factors justify the cost, but that's just my opinion. You'd have to try it out for yourself.

Rather than get the CD-RW drive why don't you just get the DVD-RW? I have 2 Pioneer 104s in my PC and the same DVD-ROM as you've got. I hardly burn CDs anymore, but when I do I use the DVD burner. It would save you a valuable IDE channel. If you go ATA for extra drives you can get good ATA controllers for pretty cheap. Best to put one HDD on each IDE channel and run your optical drives to the slave channel off the mobo. I've never really had any problems running optical drives on the same channel as a HDD, but it still wouldn't hurt to burn from one channel to an optical drive on another channel and vice versa.

The biggest no-no:
Never encode to the same drive you're reading from. OMG does that slow things down to a crawl

[SLICK RICK]

The reason I wanted the CDRW is because it is capable of burning 99min Cdr's.

SLICK RICK

[SLICK RICK]

The biggest no-no:
Never encode to the same drive you're reading from. OMG does that slow things down to a crawl

What exactly do you mean by that?

SLICK RICK

[arcorob]

Rallynavy..Tsk tsk....Sorry, not to step on your toes, but you are spouting Urban legends here.

1) The increase on any properly setup RAID 0 array is nearly 100% over non-raid. If you have sen 50%, you have a problem or bottleneck somewhere else. I have the configuration Slick Rick has (Mobo) and have clocked double the data rate of a single drive.

2) Raid is unstable - If dropped from a high shelf. Otherwise, no more unstable than a normal ATA drive. Besides, Rick is using the VIA raid controller on -board as ATA- In other words, non-raid extra ATA controller. Nice feature from ASUS.
Even if he was using RAID it is VERY VERY VERY stable and especially for video that has a short life on disk. My RAID (4 120 gig drives, two raid zero arrays) have been worked to death , through power glitches, etc. Not a single bad stripe, sector or problem..

3) SATA ATA is NOT in any way shape or form faster. In some cases, it is slower than normal IDE attached devices, facts taken from benchmarks at Tomshardware, PCWorld, etc It has some maturing to do.


Am not trying to step on your toes, but please, dont bad mouth things unless you can back them up or even understand what he was asking. I didnt have time to respond to the rest of the nonsense about putting optical drives on the same channel as hard drives...and other assorted drivel. Why tell him about usless SCSI drives (which are not fatser than my raid array) when he ALREADY HAS HIS DRIVES !!! Are you trying to help or trying to brag ?

articles on SATA
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/index.html

good article on RAID and S-ATA plus non-S-ATA
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1149381,00.asp

[Faustus]

SATA will be faster eventually, but both currently use the PCI bus, which is the bottle neck. So for now SATA only has cabling as its main feature. Of course there is that one SATA drive thats built like a SCSI drive, it has the advantages of SCSI but that means it has its disadvantages also.

[arcorob]

Exactly ...and I will be happy when SATA gets there because I could use the space savings on cabling. I have 6 hard drives in my tower, plus a DVD ROM , CDRW floppy and a patch panel. Thats 10 or 11 bays and trust me, getting the last 4 IDE cables was a nightmare. I was really afraid of damaging a cable plus, the new board(same as ricks) is about 1 3/4 inches deeper than the old , so the board connectors are literally parallel with the ends of the drives. doesnt leave alot of clearance....

[rallynavvie]

I have the same problem with the Tyan board and the Lian Li hard drive cage. It's supposed to fit 5 HDDs but to get one in on the far side of the cage would require some sort of wonder-IDE cable that was an inch long and would be perpendicular at all angles to the board. I had to fill up 3.5" bays with HDDs and I don't think they're getting proper cooling where they're at. Does SATA still use master/slave channels or has it gone to daisy-chaining like SCSI? I mentioned SATA because eventually it will be faster, but I have no interest in using it, at least not yet.

I do have experience to back-up my claims against RAID 0. The only weak link to my whole system was a cheap RAID card which I replaced with a better one that I got through work. I get brownouts ever so often way out here from who-knows-what and for quite a while I didn't have a UPS to compensate for it. Before I did anytime the power would dim enough to shut the system down while doing a capture/encode/etc to my RAID drive it would corrupt the drive. These are almost brand new Maxtor 80GB drives, exact same drives, and I've swapped them out with 2 more of the exact same drives from my Dell just to be sure I didn't have faulty drives. So unless I have at least two faulty drives from Maxtor I don't think that could be the issue. Now of course the power shortage would wreak havoc on my OS, but never had XP up and die on me after an outage. So only the RAID array was giving me grief. And yes, for what I used it for the data was only there a short time before it was moved to a storage drive or burned to disc, but after hours of batch encodes lost I was getting sick of it. But don't you think 400GB of RAID 0 is a bit much for temporary storage? At least for most of us I think it would be, unless you're doing some serious work with mulitple video streams/angles/and the like.

I may have been having trouble with read/write performance on my controller but I have no idea why. Either that or I didn't double-check my benchmarking (mainly TMPGEnc used to encode the same video with the same settings). Or maybe it was because I had set-up my blocks too small. I dunno if I set them to 64k or what I did.

I was bragging up SCSI, not necessarily my set-up :P We don't have enough SCSI backers here.

I don't believe in data slowing in IDE channels between devices either, but it can't hurt to set things up like that. All signals from devices on them have to go to the board/controller anyway. But reading/writing to the same drive is still a no-no. Ever try encoding an MPEG from one hard drive to the same hard drive? Ugh...

I may have to look into a RAID controller that offers striping with parity. One of them is for a 3-drive set-up so that two are RAID 0 and one has the parity data to rebuild the other two in case of failure. I can't recall if that's level 3 or 5 or what it is. So many different RAID levels, and so many virutally useless ones as well.

Here's the articles I read on RAID before investing in it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020813/index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020830/index.html