# What is a better format for HDD over 2TB Master boot with Win 7 OS RAID... GPT vs MBR?



## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Hi all,
 I am going to be getting 2x SATA  3TB Toshiba SATA 6GB HDD and would like to know,  what is a better format for my HDD over 2TB for master boot with win 7 OS RAID.... GPT or MBR?

I know if I format in MBR it will only be 2.4TB and if I do it in GPT Basic I might get 2.6TB on the drive but is there benefits or down falls to MBR or GPT other then I will get a little more size on these drives to use.

Thanks


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## Pill Monster (Sep 7, 2015)

GPT if the boot partition is over 2TB. Otherwise I'd recommend MBR unless you're a big fan of Secureboot.

2TB is huge for a system partition though. 

also why do want to RAID the OS drive?  If you got 2 drives you're better to run them separately.....
RAID with only 2x HDD isn't going to make your OS faster, that's all about access time. 

RAID is really for linear r/w speed unless you got a stack of drives...


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## Drone (Sep 7, 2015)

I don't think it makes any real difference


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> GPT if the boot partition is over 4TB. Otherwise I'd recommend MBR unless you're a big fan of Secureboot.
> 
> Why do want to RAID the OS drive?



Thanks for your reply I want it for gaming and from the raid card it will be 2 drives at 6gb each and "if I run sata from my motherboard its only 3gb" I feel the 2 at 7200rpm drives reading and writing will increase my game load and save times it will be setup in RAID 1.


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## Pill Monster (Sep 7, 2015)

Drone said:


> I don't think it makes any real difference


GPT drives can have more than 4 primary partitions,  GPT also prevents Secureboot from being disabled on some platforms. OEM's love it. 




skippy258 said:


> Thanks for your reply I want it for gaming and from the raid card it will be 2 drives at 6gb each and "if I run sata from my motherboard its only 3gb" I feel the 2 at 7200rpm drives reading and writing will increase my game load and save times it will be setup in RAID 1.


It won't make any difference.

Funny to say that actually since I have 4x 500GB in RAID 0. Good for internal drive transfers or writing to/from SSD, but not gaming.  

Btw it's only 3TB in RAID 1 (mirror), in RAID 0 all 6TB would be available.  Grab an SSD for the boot drive....


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> GPT drives can have more than 4 primary partitions,  GPT also prevents Secureboot from being disabled on some platforms. OEM's love it.
> 
> 
> It won't make any difference.
> ...



At the moment I have a 500 gb as my primary drive and its full of games,  I will clone that drive over to the 3tb drive.  I guess saying that I will have to keep it at MBR if it is a clone of my 500 gb, as it is in MBR, also all my recovery tools I use are based around MBR structure and Dos so I guess I will have to make it MBR after all hey


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## Aquinus (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> Funny to say that actually since I have 4x 500GB in RAID 0. Good for internal drive transfers or writing to/from SSD, but not gaming.


I humbly disagree. It does depend on the same. Games where a lot of streaming texture and data are used, sure, you're going to hit latency issues. If its a game where data is loaded asynchronously or up front, a rotational media drive won't be too bad. I put many games on my RAID-5 with hardly any issues to speak of.

Also, I get pretty good numbers with RAID-5.

These are the kinds of numbers I get, first is SSDs, second is HDDs; raid 0 and 5 respectively.


 

Side note: Both volumes use GPT. UEFI allows you to boot into GPT disks relatively easily assuming the board has UEFI support.


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> I humbly disagree. It does depend on the same. Games where a lot of streaming texture and data are used, sure, you're going to hit latency issues. If its a game where data is loaded asynchronously or up front, a rotational media drive won't be too bad. I put many games on my RAID-5 with hardly any issues to speak of.
> 
> Also, I get pretty good numbers with RAID-5.
> 
> ...



I was looking at raid 5, but read its harder to recover a fail HDD in RAID 5. My card IBM ServeRAID M5014 SAS/SATA 6GB/s RAID Controller Supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 (RAID 6 and 60 support with the optional M 5000Advanced Feature Key) key only costs 30 bucks if i want to go Raid 6 or 60 I plan to buy 8 of these drives 4 primary and 4 as storage have not thought what RAID i will set storage up as of yet.

My board is BIOS not UEFI but I can pick the raid card as the boot HDD and the card dose the rest from there


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## Drone (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> GPT drives can have more than 4 primary partitions,  GPT also prevents Secureboot from being disabled on some platforms. OEM's love it.



I know that. I was talking about performance. I wouldn't ever bother reformatting an MBR drive to GPT.


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## Aquinus (Sep 7, 2015)

Drone said:


> I know that. I was talking about performance. I wouldn't ever bother reformatting an MBR drive to GPT.


GTP is also required to boot from UEFI. Booting from UEFI has a number of benefits such as giving the OS a low-level interface for directly interacting with UEFI.

Consider this, when I ran a 6870 it would boot up and the BIOS screen would be a 640x480 or 800x600; some old resolution. Just by getting a 390, the BIOS screen was in 1080p. Not to say that this helps performance or anything but, it opens a lot more to be managed by the BIOS.

Consider on Mac OS X, in Preferences you have a "Startup Disk" section. That is updating EFI for the next boot. Windows running UEFI has access to do the same things. It facilitates tighter integration between the OS and the hardware. All in all, I say if your machine is UEFI capable, then doing anything other than GPT is a waste.


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## Drone (Sep 7, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> All in all, I say if your machine is UEFI capable, then doing anything other than GPT is a waste.



Evidently. I just said that if I had a working MBR on a UEFI capable machine I wouldn't bother to reformat.


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## Pill Monster (Sep 7, 2015)

skippy258 said:


> Thanks for your reply I want it for gaming and from the raid card it will be 2 drives at 6gb each and "if I run sata from my motherboard its only 3gb" I feel the 2 at 7200rpm drives reading and writing will increase my game load and save times it will be setup in RAID 1.





Aquinus said:


> I humbly disagree. It does depend on the same. Games where a lot of streaming texture and data are used, sure, you're going to hit latency issues. If its a game where data is loaded asynchronously or up front, a rotational media drive won't be too bad. I put many games on my RAID-5 with hardly any issues to speak of.
> 
> Also, I get pretty good numbers with RAID-5.
> 
> ...



You're looking at block transfer, which doesn't affect latency. Latency depends on access time.
If low latency improved game performance everyone would be using SSD's , which doesn't happen.  

What games in particular are u thinking of? ARMA.....or ?  


**Edit*
How big is your HDD buffer, if those blocks are smaller than the buffer  they're not being read from the disk.  I don't see how RAID would help you there?
Do u have anything which shows improved game performance?


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> You're looking at linear speed, linear read speed doesn't affect latency. Latency depends on access time, which is how most games load data.
> 
> With wddm 1.3 onward  GPU's can page straight from RAM anyway.    What games in particular are u thinking of? ARMA..or  ?



I play alot of Battlefield 4 and alot of different Steam games and I still like single player games I have just in the last 2 weeks replayed crises, 2 an 3, Black mesa, BioShock Infinte and half life 2 again, but I'm really getting ready for the new StarWars Battlefront game http://starwars.ea.com/starwars/battlefront looks like its going to be a winner... Hope they build a bench test direct 12 into the game as its meant to be dx12 I believe

*EDIT:* I have another Question @Aquinus @Pill Monster @Drone @T-Bob What size strips do you use in your Raid configuration 128kb or 1mb? and what size would you recommend for my setup?

I would like to go SSD but there way out of my price range and to small at the moment also i read there not good for long term storage as they do lose data over time if not connected to power not good for backup storage just faster read and write.


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## Pill Monster (Sep 7, 2015)

Drone said:


> I know that. I was talking about performance. I wouldn't ever bother reformatting an MBR drive to GPT.


Ah OK I gotcha.  Yep agreed.





skippy258 said:


> I play alot of Battlefield 4 and alot of different Steam games and I still like single player games I have just in the last 2 weeks replayed crises, 2 an 3, Black mesa, BioShock Infinte and half life 2 again, but I'm really getting ready for the new StarWars Battlefront game http://starwars.ea.com/starwars/battlefront looks like its going to be a winner... Hope they build a bench test direct 12 into the game as its meant to be dx12 I believe
> 
> *EDIT:* I have another Question @Aquinus @Pill Monster @Drone @T-Bob What size strips do you use in your Raid configuration 128kb or 1mb? and what size would you recommend for my setup?


 64K I think, can't quite remember tbh.... I'll have a look in the RAID ROM  next time.
I got 128GB SSD for the OS and about 6TB across 8 HDD's  for everything else.

When GTA V was released I thought I'd have to go SSD but everyone said don't bother...  even the guys with it on SSD.....
After playing with RAID, SSD, and single HDD for gaming I'm happy with a single, but ask around.....  Or try it yourself.....


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## Aquinus (Sep 7, 2015)

skippy258 said:


> *EDIT:* I have another Question @Aquinus @Pill Monster @Drone @T-Bob What size strips do you use in your Raid configuration 128kb or 1mb? and what size would you recommend for my setup?


128K seems to be a sweet spot for spinning drives. I was doing 4k stripes on my SSDs but when I re-did windows I changed that to 32Kb.


Pill Monster said:


> You're looking at block transfer, which doesn't affect latency. Latency depends on access time.
> If low latency improved game performance everyone would be using SSD's , which doesn't happen.


You're completely correct but, many games usually store data as big files, not a ton of small ones. Even still, once it's read once, if you have enough system memory, it will get cached. My point is that performance doesn't go in the crapper because you're running raid. Of course RAID is going to add a little bit of latency because a controller has to handle it.

The simple fact is there are times when latency is perferred and times when bandwidth is preferred. I'm just saying that in most cases, RAID is fine for running a game. I do because that's where my mass storage is being redundant (and not my boot device,) is helpful.

Although, you're right Pill, latency in RAID is a little worst but any spinning disk will be put to shame, even by a USB 3.0 flash drive.

Also, latency complements bandwidth and vice versa. Great latency but low bandwidth isn't going to help much easier. Super slow latency and high bandwidth (like satellite internet,) is the same but the opposite end of the spectrum.

You'll like these numbers though for latency:
RAID-5:
 

Single 500GB drive:
 

USB 3.0 Sandisk 32GB Flash Drive
 

RAID-0 SSDs:
 

Take it for what it's worth but latency is close (for averages,) between RAID and single drive. Although if latency is the only measure, the USB drive should be far superior to the spinning disks, right? 

All of this really is to say that as long as you're not using a 5400RPM drive and you're not swapping often, it shouldn't make a huge difference.


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Pill Monster said:


> **Edit*
> How big is your HDD buffer, if those blocks are smaller than the buffer  they're not being read from the disk.  I don't see how RAID would help you there?
> Do u have anything which shows improved game performance?



The buffer is 64MB and the drive speed is 6GB spin is 7200rpm


Pill Monster said:


> Ah OK I gotcha.  Yep agreed.
> 
> 64K I think, can't quite remember tbh.... I'll have a look in the RAID ROM  next time.
> I got 128GB SSD for the OS and about 6TB across 8 HDD's  for everything else.
> ...



Yeah I just thought it would be faster but from what I just read on this site http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/solutions/raid_levels.html turn out Raid 5 is about as fast a Raid 0. And to do Raid 5 i need 3 HDD's and I only got 2 at the moment so i guess I will have to buy another 2 drives to test out Raid 5 one drive as a spare

Info taken from http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/solutions/raid_levels.html

*When to use which RAID level*
We can classify data into two basic types: random and streaming. As indicated previously, there are two general types of RAID arrays: non-parity (RAID 1, 10) and parity (RAID 5, 6, 50, 60).

Random data is generally small in nature (i.e., small blocks), with a large number of small reads and writes making up the data pattern. This is typified by database-type data.

Streaming data is large in nature, and is characterized by such data types as video, images, general large files.

While it is not possible to accurately determine all of a server’s data usage, and servers often change their usage patterns over time, the general rule of thumb is that random data is best suited to non-parity RAID, while streaming data works best and is most cost-effective on parity RAID.

Note that it is possible to set up both RAID types on the same controller, and even possible to set up the same RAID types on the same set of drives. So if, for example, you have eight 2TB drives, you can make a RAID 10 of 1TB for your database-type data, and a RAID 5 of the capacity that is left on the drives for your general and/or streaming type data (approximately 12TB). Having these two different arrays spanning the same drives will not impact performance, but your data will benefit in performance from being situated on the right RAID level.

*Default RAID settings*
When creating a RAID array in the BIOS or management software, you will be presented with defaults that the controller proposes for the RAID settings. The most important of these is the “stripe size.” While there is much science, math and general knowledge involved in working out what is the best stripe size for your array, in the vast majority of cases the defaults work best, so use the 256kb stripe size as suggested by the controller.

*SSDs and read/write cache*
In an SSD-only RAID array, disabling the read and write cache will improve performance in a vast majority of cases. However, you may need test whether enabling read and write cache will improve performance even further. Note that it is possible to disable and enable read and write cache on the on the fly without affecting or reconfiguring the array, or restarting the server, so testing both configurations is recommended.


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## skippy258 (Sep 7, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> 128K seems to be a sweet spot for spinning drives. I was doing 4k stripes on my SSDs but when I re-did windows I changed that to 32Kb.
> 
> You're completely correct but, many games usually store data as big files, not a ton of small ones. Even still, once it's read once, if you have enough system memory, it will get cached. My point is that performance doesn't go in the crapper because you're running raid. Of course RAID is going to add a little bit of latency because a controller has to handle it.
> 
> ...



Thanks for that info the 4TB HDD I had, wanted to use 128kb, so if it changes to 256kb with the 3TB HDD I will pick the default that is displayed I guess hey


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## Aquinus (Sep 7, 2015)

You know, you really can reduce it to what you're planning on doing. RAID-0 and RAID-1 tend to excel when it comes to writing data as nothing extra has to be done like RAID-5 and 6 and their sub-levels which requires calculating the ECC data (XOR usually.) So writes to parity-based RAID can be slower thanks to extra work being done by the CPU or the RAID controller.

If you consider read heavy situations, RAID-5 and 6 actually offer the same amount of read performance as RAID-0 because data is still stripped across all of your disks.

So I would say, if you're going to be doing a lot of writes (like video editing, a heavily used RDBMS, anything where a lot of data is going to be writte often,) then  levels: 1, 0 and their sub-levels will be optimal (like 0+1).

If you're mainly going to be doing reads from the device, then RAID-5 or 6 is going to perform just as well as RAID-0 since data is still spanned over several drives. The downfall if calculating parity bit (which can be relatively slow for writes,) or the loss of storage space for parity maxsize(n - 1) (which you still lose in RAID 1 maxsize(1).)

If you have 3 disks already, I would say run RAID-5 now. Don't wait for another disk, even if you have one ordered. Even if a drive fails on your with 3 disk RAID-5, the array will remain available so long as a second drive doesn't fail. This is referred to as running in "degraded" mode. It's also relatively easy to migrate from a 3-disk RAID-5 to a 4-disk RAID-5 given most fake raid controllers (RAID controllers that pass RAID commands through to the CPU instead of a real RAID controller.)

As I said before, 128K seems to be a generic sweet spot however there are probably plenty of cases where it's not optimal but is close enough to not make a difference. Stripe sizes too small will kill your performance. The only reason SSDs do pretty well with smaller stripes is because they have access latency low enough to handle it gracefully.

Also with this all said, writing to my RAID-5 barely registers as CPU load despite being Intel's RAID on X79 which doesn't use a real RAID controller as I explained before, but rather one that is emulated by the system at the kernel level in the driver itself.

tl;dr:
RAID-5, 6, and parity based RAID levels are best when you read a lot and write sometimes.
RAID 1 and 0 based RAID levels are best when you write a lot and read the same or less as there is no XOR'ing for parity and the most that needs to be done is data has to be stored twice. As a result, you lose a lot of drive space when using RAID-1 because *everything* is duplicated.


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## skippy258 (Sep 10, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> You know, you really can reduce it to what you're planning on doing. RAID-0 and RAID-1 tend to excel when it comes to writing data as nothing extra has to be done like RAID-5 and 6 and their sub-levels which requires calculating the ECC data (XOR usually.) So writes to parity-based RAID can be slower thanks to extra work being done by the CPU or the RAID controller.
> 
> If you consider read heavy situations, RAID-5 and 6 actually offer the same amount of read performance as RAID-0 because data is still stripped across all of your disks.
> 
> ...




Thanks for your advice @Aquinus and I will keep this in mind when I set up the Raid just waiting on cables but in the mean time I have been learning how to change my MBR to GPT as i feel GPT would be the way to go since it will soon become the standard.

I have watched this tut twice now and one Question about has arisen to me about  GPT...do I need UEFI to use GPT as a boot drive? 










I ask this because in the tut He changes to UEFI boot, and my system is BIOS ... I can make my RAID controller master boot in BIOS HDD selection, only problem is i'm waiting on my mini SAS to SATA cable to turn up, so in the mean time I am using my SATA controller to test the GPT partitioning out on the drives with out Raid just till I get my boot drive to GPT settings


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 10, 2015)

UEFI -> GPT
BIOS -> MBR

I use GPT whenever possible.



skippy258 said:


> ...do I need UEFI to use GPT as a boot drive?


YES!  BIOS can only boot MBR.


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## skippy258 (Sep 10, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> UEFI -> GPT
> BIOS -> MBR
> 
> I use GPT whenever possible.
> ...



Ok Thanks @FordGT90Concept I say well that just changed things, so what about my card IBM ServeRAID M5014 SAS/SATA 6GB/s RAID Controller can the controller boot GPT as I can pick the Raid controller to be the master boot HDD in my BIOS... I ask this as I can not test this out at the moment as I'm still waiting on my mini SAS to SATA cable.


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 10, 2015)

Even with it being a separate controller, it won't work.  BIOS simply doesn't know how to boot an operating system on a GPT volume.  If your motherboard was UEFI, it should work.

Most motherboards have boot options that start with "UEFI:" For example, "UEFI: Windows Boot Manager."  If you don't see any UEFI options in your motherboard BIOS, booting to GPT is a non-starter.  When you try to install an operating system on GPT via BIOS, it may appear it works at first but one of two things will happen:
1) When the OS tries to boot into the volume for the first time to continue install, it will crash (Windows 7 means BSOD).
2) If it succeeds, it automatically reformatted the drive as MBR.


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## skippy258 (Sep 10, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Even with it being a separate controller, it won't work.  BIOS simply doesn't know how to boot an operating system on a GPT volume.  If your motherboard was UEFI, it should work.
> 
> Most motherboards have boot options that start with "UEFI:" For example, "UEFI: Windows Boot Manager."  If you don't see any UEFI options in your motherboard BIOS, booting to GPT is a non-starter.  When you try to install an operating system on GPT via BIOS, it may appear it works at first but one of two things will happen:
> 1) When the OS tries to boot into the volume for the first time to continue install, it will crash (Windows 7 means BSOD).
> 2) If it succeeds, it automatically reformatted the drive as MBR.



Well Thanks for that info @FordGT90Concept I differently took the long way round to learn that, but Hey....  I have learnt alot  from you guy's @Aquinus @Pill Monster @Drone @T-Bob @FordGT90Concept and just have to say Thank you for all your help.

I see now I will not be able to achieve what I originally wanted but the up side is now I guess, I will look at getting 3x 2TB SSHD drives for a larger Boot drive, then have them 3x 2tb's in MBR partition... But that will be a month or 2 down the line after I get a few more storage HDDS to run in RAID.


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