# Raid 0 is slower than no raid?!?



## Black Panther (Aug 26, 2008)

Now I'm not one who believes all that I read posted on the net, but I came across this on another forum:



> The Urban Legends about RAID drives are just so much pie in the sky when it's games that are involved. RAID1 and RAID5 are great for creating an automatic, continuous backup, but RAID0 simply has too much builtin overhead that unless the files it deals with are truly HUGE, there is no speed advantage. There is in fact a performance HIT from RAID0.
> 
> Anand Tech ran exhaustive tests several years ago, and found RAID0 slower on all of the games they benchmarked.



I think this is mistaken? 
If yes I want to correct him at least for the sake of not misinforming people who are not so tech-y on this gaming forum.
And well, if he's correct... why on earth do guys put drives in Raid0 array?


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## giorgos th. (Aug 26, 2008)

mmmmm....i dont think so...


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## Black Panther (Aug 26, 2008)

That's what I thought as well, but this article appears to have different views.


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## Grimskull (Aug 26, 2008)

RAID0 is good for accessing data, reading and writing, but no real benefit in gaming. But i still use it the whole time! 

http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/pg_2.htm


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## Black Panther (Aug 26, 2008)

Grimskull said:


> RAID0 is good for accessing data, reading and writing, but no real benefit in gaming. But i still use it the whole time!
> 
> http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/pg_2.htm



But aren't the drives constantly accessing data, reading and writing as well while playing a game?


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## xfire (Aug 26, 2008)

Not constantly, at the start of each level or so everything is loaded into ram.


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## Pinchy (Aug 26, 2008)

That article from anand was years ago, when onboard raid SUCKED.

The newer controllers are much better, and there are real world advantages.

It wont affect anything in game, but will always have faster load times.


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## Grimskull (Aug 26, 2008)

Xfire is correct. The data is pulled from the harddrives and loaded into the RAM for gaming. Only sent back to the hard drive when saving a game or loading a new level. you will notice the speed and performance when doing something like installing a huge software program like Reason, Photoshop or premier pro. Having a RAID 0 setup for Photoshop, flash or Premier pro is a must!! speaking from expericence!!


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## Pinchy (Aug 26, 2008)

Grimskull said:


> Xfire is correct. The data is pulled from the harddrives and loaded into the RAM for gaming. Only sent back to the hard drive when saving a game or loading a new level. you will notice the speed and performance when doing something like installing a huge software program like Reason, Photoshop or premier pro. Having a RAID 0 setup for Photoshop, flash or Premier pro is a must!! speaking from expericence!!



Yeah but you also have to remember, Windows uses both virtual memory and RAM. So if its using at least part of v memory when loading the game into RAM/v memory, its using the hard drive, and a faster hard drive will ofc be better .

This doesnt affect people who turn pagefile off though, ie me  (Then I use 85% of 4GB  when in photoshop )


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## Wile E (Aug 26, 2008)

Black Panther said:


> That's what I thought as well, but this article appears to have different views.



No, that article is saying that Anand and Storage Review are mistaken. Those two were either not using benchmarks that put an actual load on the hard drive (both of them), or were limiting the performance of the RAID array by using a PCI controller card instead of a much faster PCI-X or PCIe controller card (Storage Review).

You also have to realize how old those reviews are. The Anand review was done on a now anchient ICHR5 on-board controller. Far inferior to today's offerings. These reviews were from 2004, yet Storage Review was using tests from 2002 that didn't even fully tax the storage system when they released, let alone 2 years later.

Read the entire article you linked, and you'll see that there are definitely gains to be had.

I can also tell you from first hand experience, that RAID0 is faster at most things. Especially anything involving transferring large files.


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## Deleted member 3 (Aug 26, 2008)

Pinchy said:


> That article from anand was years ago, when onboard raid SUCKED.
> 
> The newer controllers are much better, and there are real world advantages.
> 
> It wont affect anything in game, but will always have faster load times.



Where is the article? ie how do you know they used onboard RAID?


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## Grimskull (Aug 26, 2008)

also they might have being using SATA 1.5 drives.... just an after thaught. 

85% of 4GB RAM for photshop sounds interesting *strokes chin*

When i get my new rig up and running i'll let you know what the story is then!


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## Wile E (Aug 26, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Where is the article? ie how do you know they used onboard RAID?



It's mentioned in the counter-article Black Panther posted.

http://tweakers.net/reviews/515/1/raid-0-hype-or-blessing-pagina-1.html


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## Deleted member 3 (Aug 26, 2008)

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=4
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
1GB DDR400 SDRAM


So the claim is that in the i875 days onboard RAID was a lot worse than now? I'd like to see some numbers on that. As I have my doubts there.


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## DrunkenMafia (Aug 26, 2008)

yeah that must be an old article, back when the onboard controllers suxd.  I used to have raid on my old gaming machine and bf2 loaded WAY faster than on a single drive..  it was quite a big difference from what I remember.


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## yogurt_21 (Aug 26, 2008)

raid 0 is faster on data transfers and access, but it shows limited to no gains while gaming. I've always found a single raptor better for gaming.


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## Deleted member 3 (Aug 26, 2008)

yogurt_21 said:


> raid 0 is faster on data transfers and access, but it shows limited to no gains while gaming. I've always found a single raptor better for gaming.



According to what logic would it be faster on access?


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## btarunr (Aug 26, 2008)

RAID 0 benefits gaming. Make sure the volume is properly defragmented.


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## Deleted member 3 (Aug 26, 2008)

btarunr said:


> RAID 0 benefits gaming. Make sure the volume is properly defragmented.



It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.


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## btarunr (Aug 26, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.



Loading time is part of gaming. Maps and other resources loading faster during online gameplay or during a LAN is a boon, a zippy progress-bar is flaunt-worthy too. On the other hand the CPU overhead could slightly affect FPS (frames/second) in massive world environments such as in say Battlefield 2 where resources are streamed as the player goes around a huge world/map.


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## suraswami (Aug 26, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.



Its true and not true.  True - FPS won't increase or there won't be any difference, may be 1 or 2 FPS because of faster loading page files.
Not True - Even though not much difference in FPS the load times between levels say BF2 is much faster, the faster you get in the more chance of getting into a APV, Armor, FAV etc which will give you more kills.

There is difference between generations of Onboard Raid controllers.  On NForce2 Socket A board raid sucked, it will be better off with single drive.  On Nforce3 ultra 2 fold increase in performance compared to NForce2.  But now I using Raid on my new ECS GF8200A and I see vast improvement in load times.  Thats because NFroce3 only supported Sata I and the controller's thru put is not that great.

Raid 0 will give over all performance boost in wide variety of apps including games.


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## btarunr (Aug 26, 2008)

RAID and its CPU overhead could mar FPS, not improve it....unless it's a $500 RAID card that's driving the disks.


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## theeldest (Aug 26, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.



I'm of the opinion that it depends on the game.

Sure, playing Battlefield 2 probably won't benefit much from a faster drive. But the game I play most is Oblivion and I've got a few GBs of mods that I play. When I used a RAID setup, there was a definite improvement. I'd say I gained about 5-10 fps (My system was doing about 20 - 30 fps before, and 25 - 40 fps after).

It's also going to depend on the drives you use. If you're already using Raptors, you may not see a large jump in using two in RAID0. But if you're using something that only gives 40MB/s read, then you RAID0 a couple (because you've got them sitting around), the difference is going to be more noticeable.

It all depends on where your bottleneck is for that program. If you've got 1GB of memory, then you're using your discs more. If you've got 4GB, then the difference will be less.


There's no way someone can just say that "RAID0 doesn't benefit gamers". 

I'd be willing to say that RAID0 affects gamers that have a HDD bottleneck.


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## Morgoth (Aug 26, 2008)

can anny one tell me what teh differends is in raid0 1 2 3 4 5 ?


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## cray86 (Aug 26, 2008)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Most popular are RAID 0,1,5

All others are exotic or have specialized applications. RAID 10 or 0+1 is probably the next most, although you need 4 drives with only the space of two. But you get excellent coverages with performance as well.


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## Wile E (Aug 27, 2008)

RAID also heavily benefits people that do a lot of multitasking. Encode a video, and fire up a game at the same time on a single drive vs a RAID0 array, and see the difference in loading times, RAID can handle more simultaneous I/O ops than a single drive can.

Will RAID benefit someone that only surfs the web and uses Word? No, it won't. But if you are a heavy multitasker, it makes itself noticeable really quickly.


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## Pinchy (Aug 27, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Where is the article? ie how do you know they used onboard RAID?



Lol WileE beat me to it.



DanTheBanjoman said:


> http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=4
> Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
> Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
> 1GB DDR400 SDRAM
> ...



I never have actually owned a RAID system before my current one, but from what ive read in the forums and an article I think I saw like a year back, onboard RAID has vastly improved.



yogurt_21 said:


> raid 0 is faster on data transfers and access, but it shows limited to no gains while gaming. I've always found a single raptor better for gaming.



Yer I dont get that. I havent used a raptor but how would it make games load faster :\? It can access data a lot faster but when it comes to copying game data into RAM the RAID array would be loads faster.



Wile E said:


> Will RAID benefit someone that only surfs the web and uses Word? No, it won't.



Yes it will!!!!! Their OS will load slightly faster ...


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## Wile E (Aug 27, 2008)

Pinchy said:


> Yes it will!!!!! Their OS will load slightly faster ...


lol. Yeah, but hardly worth the trouble and expense for the average user.


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## niko084 (Aug 27, 2008)

btarunr said:


> RAID and its CPU overhead could mar FPS, not improve it....unless it's a $500 RAID card that's driving the disks.



Exactly, unless you have a hardware raid controller with its own processor you are using a bit of your cpu to handle the raid.

Stripe is used in blocks, common is 64k off one drive then 64k off the next drive, it helps when loading, moving or writing files larger than that of the block size.

In a slow machine it can seriously hurt your performance if you are using a driver/software based raid controller.

As far as increasing average fps and such in a game, highly unlikely as stated by many of the knowledgeable people above.

Raid has its purposes but they are pretty much limited to servers and people who want specific things for specific reasons.


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## xfire (Aug 27, 2008)

A simple explaination of RAID 
RAID 0 - Its sort of like your SLI/x-fire setup where two HDD's are used as one(The data is split between the two) giving you twice the speed.
RAID 1 - This is for Data backup. You require two hard disks and both the hard disk contain the same data so if one fails the other still remains.
RAID 5 - This is like RAID 0 but each hard contains something called a parity block which can be used to restore data if the other hard disk fails.


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## xvi (Aug 28, 2008)

RAID has it's place. I've found that raw transfer speed is greatly improved for me. This trickles down to application launches and the whatnot. Real life things like boot times aren't amazing, but neither is my nForce RAID controller (nForce3 chipset).

IMO, it all depends on the controller. Onboard RAID only exists because motherboard manufacturers saw a market for cheap RAID regardless of _actual performance_. Desktop customers are easily sold on the illusion of performance and/or bragging rights. I believe NCQ/TCQ has a bit of the same story. Like RAID, it's great for servers and not as great for desktop use. Also like RAID, it can be implemented cheaply and still helps somewhat in certain situations.

Real RAID controllers are going to cost $100 at the very least. That is where you see your performance gains. Put a server RAID controller in a desktop machine and you'll have the gains you're looking for.


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