Re: Building the high-end 30" LCD game system for $3340

What about the 10K RPM raptors? Two of those in RAID 0 would be nice with a single 750GB hard drive as a backup(or two in raid 1 for extra protection). That may add more money to the build cost but i think it would be worth it.

Raptors don't have good bang per buck. You can always buy more 7200 RPM drives and get more performance at same cost.

Raptors cost a LOT of money for a little more performance. Raptors don't have good bang per buck. You can always buy more 7200 RPM drives and get more performance at same cost. It's not worth it in my opinion.

With two regular hard drives in RAID-1, you get plenty of IO performance. You can also configure a RAID-0 for RAW throughput for loading games) on a separate portion of the hard drive along with the RAID-0. If you had the money to buy Raptors, you could buy twice as many 7200 RPM drives and get even more spindles for even more performance. The best part is that you get 4x the capcity as well which is always handy.

Re: Building the high-end 30" LCD game system for $3340

True, So you can just buy more 7200RPM drive's and put them in like RAID 5?

Think of Hard drives in this way

Jeff

Altnough my math has been over simplified and is very erroneous, it does give you a bit of an example of what George is talking about.

When writing to a disk, you traditionally write to the outside of the disk first. The advantage of this is that when seeking, the larger disk have the advantage, because even at a lower RPM, the read head doesn't have to travel as far to aquire as much data. For instance. While a 1 TB drive only runs at 7200 RPM, a 500 GB drive would have to spin at 14400 RPM to cover the same amount of ground. That is as long as the 1TB drive doesn't have more than 500 GB of data on it.

Now hardware gurus can tear me apart, because I know my math is crap for this and I can't remember the formulas off of the top of my head. But that is a demonstration. In fact, I considered using SATA RAID instead of SAS RAID because the drives were 3 times the size and would reduce the amount of seek time if I partitioned them accordingly.

As for RAID1? I am not for sure what George is thinking there, but he and I have disagreed on these matters before.

Yup, RAID-5 works quite nicely

Yup, RAID-5 works quite nicely. You get the raw throughput of 2 hard drives combined for read and write and you get improved read IO performance. So the bottom line is that for less money, you get more performance and more capacity using 7200 RPM hard drives.

Still confused about RAID 1

If I remember correctly, RAID 1 is mirroring and therefore you are writing and reading the same data twice even though at the same speed. I am not sure how that would benefit the speed of a PC, but if you say it would.... The only advantage I could see is the caching of the controller. RAID 1 is a hinderer at this point because first you have to read from the drive into cache and then you can read the cache. This is an advantage on writing where you can write to cache and then slowly spin cache off on to the drives.

I think I need to see some numbers before I could buy the RAID1 == Increase in speed.

RAID-1 reads twice as fast

RAID-1 reads twice as fast but writes at the same speed. RAID-1 can independently read from each drive so it's twice as fast on read throughput (with two threads or more) and read IOPS. It has no benefit on write performance though. I can't read faster for a single thread though.

With the ICH9R, you can run the first 50 GBs of the hard drive in RAID-1 but run the remaining 700 GBs in RAID-0. RAID-0 with two drives can read/write faster for single threads or multiple threads. However, it's not as efficient on reading multiple threads than RAID-1 in my testing.

Still confused about RAID 1

If I remember correctly, RAID 1 is mirroring and therefore you are writing and reading the same data twice even though at the same speed. I am not sure how that would benefit the speed of a PC, but if you say it would.... The only advantage I could see is the caching of the controller. RAID 1 is a hinderer at this point because first you have to read from the drive into cache and then you can read the cache. This is an advantage on writing where you can write to cache and then slowly spin cache off on to the drives.

I think I need to see some numbers before I could buy the RAID1 == Increase in speed.

I still hate Refresh

Oh those simple things I take for granted.

Thank you for clarification

I don't believe I ever heard that about RAID1 before, but I often dismissed it over the years because of my leaning towards RAID5

Here are the numbers nuCrash, RAID1 is very fast

nuCrash says: "I think I need to see some numbers before I could buy the RAID1 == Increase in speed."

Remember this?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=484

I showed that RAID1 and independent sets of RAID1 is the fastest type of RAID for servers.

Thanks for the history lesson

nt

Application Needs?

I have a question about which would be better performance for a multithreaded file server

When multiple users connect to an ftp system, pulling large files, the hard drive begins to thrash back and forth between sessions. Would I be better off separating the drives by need and limiting the connection to each drive, or would I be better to set up all volumes on a single RAID5 setup and hope for the best to get better performance. Keep in mind this would be for very large files such as HD video.

Later.

Separate drives handle multiple sessions better, but more complex to manage

Separate drives handle multiple sessions better, but they're more complex to manage. If you care about multi-request performance, what I would do if I had a large file server is use two sets of RAID-6 with 8 drives per volume. However, separate volumes can't combine fire power when there is only one request, but two volumes do pretty well.

You could also do 14 drives in RAID-6 and just use the faster aggregate performance which may not be as good for multiple jobs but still pretty decent. Then you can use the remaining 2 drives in RAID-0 for a very large and fast scratch space which is always handy.

Multiple FTP Requests

I was considering that to be the best route to avoid thrashing. However, I am limited by my boards controller only having 6 SATA ports. While I have moved the OS off onto a 120 GB IDE drive purely for purposes of doing such, I am stuck with shoving 1TB drives in there to get as much space as possible. I figured I could set up separate ftp servers on each drive giving only one connection per drive and allowing them to connect as they see fit. Although this could lock out other users, I could shift more data this way. I need a better queuing system though so while a user may not be able to pull from a locked drive, they could queue up data for later and essentially get in line. I don't know of an ftp server that allows that.

I also chose dual GB NICs for this server, but I am concerned about load balancing. Windows Server 2008 the best option for this?

Load balancing rarely works well

Load balancing rarely works well. FTP shouldn't cause that much thrashing since Internet throughput is very limited, unless you're talking about internal LAN usage of FTP. But in general, the more drives you have the faster your storage performance.

Re: Building the high-end 30" LCD game system for $3340

I would pass on the Razer mouse (though that Destructor pad is pretty good) or ANY razer mouse for that matter. Not bashing the Singaporean company here but they have some SERIOUS Quality issues on recent hardware (uneven budging base induces rocking, teflon feet have been thinned out from previous versions and wears out more on hardsurface mousepads like their Destructor), and have always had very poorly designed software (I've gone through 2 copperheads, and 3 Deathadders).

I have the Destructor and I would recommend a mouse with large and thick teflon feet (G5 or G7) since small plastic ones on either the MX518 or the MS IE3.0 wears out much too quickly. My 2 cents.

Thanks for the feedback Limppy

I did have feet wear out, but the mouse was very old and it was shipped to me in a cardboard box when the company was just starting up. That older mouse did have tracking problems as it got older too and my friend did have one Razor mouse die on him as well. I have the new Krait and it seems ok though.