1 Terabyte Hard Drive or Raid0?
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Performance ISN'T an issue w/ HTPC's - Reading the movies doesn't take much 'horsepower'
Performance ISN'T an issue w/ HTPC's - Reading the movies doesn't take much 'horsepower'
A dvd can have a bitrate of up to 10 megabit/s or app 1.25 megabyte/s.
A modern harddrive is many times faster than this, at least 10 megabyte/s.
Also you will tax the CPU with the RAID unless you buy a RAID controller
with a processor of it's own. These RAID controllers are fairly expensive...
/Ingvar
A modern harddrive is many times faster than this, at least 10 megabyte/s.
Also you will tax the CPU with the RAID unless you buy a RAID controller
with a processor of it's own. These RAID controllers are fairly expensive...
/Ingvar
don't forget about data protection - failure of either drive in RAID0 will cause loss of the whole volume. In other words, the RAID0 drive is twice as likely to die compared to single drive (assuming MTBF are same). Price-wise, it is prolly a wash between 2 x 500GB vs 1TB drive .
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The new 1T hard drives get about 80MB/s using built-in Intel ICH9 chipset. Other SATA bridges probably get the same rate. You can stream a dozen full-bitrate DVDs at that bandwidth.
RAID0 does *not* consume CPU since parity calculations are not required. There are other benefits to enterprise class raid cards but overkill for your application. MTBF can be a problem in the first three months or after three years. See "Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things" at http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/m...resting-thing/ .
/R
RAID0 does *not* consume CPU since parity calculations are not required. There are other benefits to enterprise class raid cards but overkill for your application. MTBF can be a problem in the first three months or after three years. See "Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things" at http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/m...resting-thing/ .
/R
I wouldn't use RAID0 for anything but a temporary high speed workplace. The increase in possible data loss it too much risk for me. I know you have all the DVDs as a backup but what about your time spent ripping all those discs (1000/8=125). Could be much more if you rip just the movie.
I'd rather use either one 1TB or 2 500GBs shared separately.
I'd rather use either one 1TB or 2 500GBs shared separately.
I'm knocking on wood here but I have been running my two Raid 0 Raptors for well over 5 years with image backups. Never had any probs with my 2x36gb drives I just run the OS with a moderate 128bit stripping, the one advantage that nothing can touch is the speed of Raid0 when loading an OS or other large apps.
Re imaging my raid array takes 6mins, loading an OS like XP or Vista is like 15 min. All of my storage is formatted in NTFS as logical drives with Sata connections for quick disconnects if I need to use that drive. And it will connect to just about any PC.
The Bad:
Drivers can be tricky to install, Vista uses a drop down menu so it's easy to miss. Some third party mobos don't even give you the needed driver so you may have to search for it. The easiest way to load the F6 drivers is to burn it on a bootable DVD/CD, floppys are just to unreliable, talk about failure I quit buying those things back in 98.
In case of a drive failing your screwed until you can replace the drive/s, but you can still use a single drive for emergency's and run your back up image.
Maybe I'm just lucky or just used really good parts clean power is very important and every drive I have bought nothing ever failed, people either have the best or worst luck when it comes to these things. Some hate it some love it, once you go raid 0 it's hard to go back.
Theres good and bad for everything, so it's just a matter of choice... I've had good luck with Raid 0.
I'm knocking on wood here but I have been running my two Raid 0 Raptors for well over 5 years with image backups. Never had any probs with my 2x36gb drives I just run the OS with a moderate 128bit stripping, the one advantage that nothing can touch is the speed of Raid0 when loading an OS or other large apps.
Re imaging my raid array takes 6mins, loading an OS like XP or Vista is like 15 min. All of my storage is formatted in NTFS as logical drives with Sata connections for quick disconnects if I need to use that drive. And it will connect to just about any PC.
The Bad:
Drivers can be tricky to install, Vista uses a drop down menu so it's easy to miss. Some third party mobos don't even give you the needed driver so you may have to search for it. The easiest way to load the F6 drivers is to burn it on a bootable DVD/CD, floppys are just to unreliable, talk about failure I quit buying those things back in 98.
In case of a drive failing your screwed until you can replace the drive/s, but you can still use a single drive for emergency's and run your back up image.
Maybe I'm just lucky or just used really good parts clean power is very important and every drive I have bought nothing ever failed, people either have the best or worst luck when it comes to these things. Some hate it some love it, once you go raid 0 it's hard to go back.
Theres good and bad for everything, so it's just a matter of choice... I've had good luck with Raid 0.
For your average Joe a RAID 5 array seems to be a really good compromise between data safety and speed. As umdivx points out you can get 500GB pretty cheap. Throw 3 of them in an array and you end up with 1TB.
I ended up using a motherboard with the Nvidia RAID controller built onto the MB. Running the RAID 5 array on three 7200 RPM drives with 16MB buffers ends up giving me a Vista drive performance rating of 5.6 with minimal CPU loading (haven't bothered doing SioSoftware Sandra benchmarks since that was more than good enough for me). In the 3 months I've been running the new machine I've had a drive go bad in the array, replaced the drive, rebuilt perfectly all without any downtown other than the time to power down and unplug/replug the drive. Great peace of mind, great performance, good price, what else do you need?
Edit: and no, heat and noise haven't been a problem....
I ended up using a motherboard with the Nvidia RAID controller built onto the MB. Running the RAID 5 array on three 7200 RPM drives with 16MB buffers ends up giving me a Vista drive performance rating of 5.6 with minimal CPU loading (haven't bothered doing SioSoftware Sandra benchmarks since that was more than good enough for me). In the 3 months I've been running the new machine I've had a drive go bad in the array, replaced the drive, rebuilt perfectly all without any downtown other than the time to power down and unplug/replug the drive. Great peace of mind, great performance, good price, what else do you need?
Edit: and no, heat and noise haven't been a problem....
Well, there's a world of difference between snapping an OS image with some Apps (~30GB) and backing up 1TB of ripped DVD content. Assuming one just rips as-is (no re-encoding), it will probably be 20min time invested per DVD. Can easily go toward 2hrs when re-encoding.
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As others have said, if this is just to store a movie collection then why do you want a raid 0 configuration? You can just get the two 500 GB drives since they are cheaper than a 1 TB drive and not raid them together. The extra speed of raid 0 will make no difference for storing or playing movies.
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Assuming the same drive type, yes, RAID0 cuts MTBF in half.
Once you pass the initial three month burn-in process you will probably be ok runing a RAID0 array for a few years. I assume that you have a decent case with good airflow, power is relativey stable, etc, etc.
unRaid is one solution to the single volume issue as is Ubuntu Linux LVM if you have the expertise. unRaid is a dedicated file server and you aren't meant to use it as your media center too.
/R
Assuming the same drive type, yes, RAID0 cuts MTBF in half.
Once you pass the initial three month burn-in process you will probably be ok runing a RAID0 array for a few years. I assume that you have a decent case with good airflow, power is relativey stable, etc, etc.
unRaid is one solution to the single volume issue as is Ubuntu Linux LVM if you have the expertise. unRaid is a dedicated file server and you aren't meant to use it as your media center too.
/R
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