windows 8 - Custom Build - SSD for OS and Raid 1/0 HDDs for Everything Else?
2014-07
Jesse Aaron Bellas
In a few months, I will be building a custom desktop computer. The purposes of this computer will be playing Minecraft, recording HD video, editing HD video (and ofc compressing/rendering it), and possible animation using Blender.
My initial question is this: would a RAID setup even benefit me enough to be worthwhile?
Because I will be doing HD video recording, I was curious whether I should invest in using a RAID system instead of the standard single HDD. I was also wondering if it would be possible to install Windows 8 onto the SSD (as I have heard it increases boot time) and put everything else on the HDD(s)/RAID.
I do not know much about RAID, however, from what I have read, I should use a RAID 1/0 combo instead of a RAID 5, being RAID 5 uses the computer's processing power if you do not have a RAID controller card.
Any additional information to add to my lack of information would be greatly appreciated as well, as will any hardware recommendations. Thank you for your assistance!
Damon
It is a great idea to put windows on a smaller SSD and then run a RAID for your working or scratch disks. RAID gives you the best bang for you buck right now in size vs performance vs price. A 4 drive RAID 0 with some used 160 GB HLFS drives on ebay will run you about $120 giving you about 600GB usable space and very fast throughput; probably in the 200-300 MB/s range. But a RAID 0 with 4 drives will probably run a single failure every 1-3 years that you need to plan on so just buy a fifth drive for a spare for another $30.
HDD's do well when you read and write larger files like video files. SSDs work good at that as well, but they really shine when accessing 1'000's of small files like windows has. And when there is that much of a price premium, you don't want the performance potential to go to waste like on larger files that can be efficiently served by spindle HDD's properly setup.
The biggest caveat of the RAID 0 is if ANY drive fails, you lose the array. So you need another drive as a backup drive that you sync daily or more often via a program like sync toy or free file sync so when you lose a drive (it will happen) you do not lose your work.
Even with a quality used RAID card and a 1TB drive to backup the raid, you still are upwards of 1/3 the price of a comparable SSD. And a 1TB+ usable array using 300GB HLFS drives would only add about $80 more.
RAID 5 is great for read speeds, but writing is slower because of the parity it has to update and/or write so it would not fit your needs well because you will have both alot of reading and writing. A RAID 10 would give you redundancy so you could backup or sync less often but the number of drives doubles for the same performance. And not many computer cases have room for 8 drives; also a typical 4 drive RAID 10 will give you half the throughput of a 4 drive RAID 0.
As a note, to keep throughput at its maximum, you will want to purchase drives as identical as possible, at least using the same model of drive. When performance isn't an issue, you can mix drives but performance and life of the HDD's will be slightly degraded. And from my research, used HLFS drives are about the fastest (throughput, not spindle speed alone) cheapest drives that can be had right now.
SSD in the corporate IT world are being adopted for their performance, but they still are too pricey to be viable for mass storage needs so spindle hard drives are still the the norm. So unless you have money to burn, get some fast used HLFS hard drives and a quality 3 ware, Areca, or similar 4-8 ports used raid card.
Then don't forget the Firepro or Quado graphics card and lots of RAM!
Seventoes
Me and a buddy were debating about this earlier, and neither of us are really pros in the field. I figured someone on here might know.
The debate was about weather it would be smarter (in terms of performance and cost) to buy, say, 4 250GB HDDs and set them up in striped RAID 0, or a single smaller SSD. It seems to me that the access time advantage of the SSD would pretty much override any benefit gained from the striping, but I'm not positive. Anyone have any insight?
Per Knytt
If you are concerned about latency (access time), RAID-0 does not buy you much. You may get a little benefit if you're doing lots of simultaneous, independent accesses if these are spread out over more spindles but they will still be limited by the relatively long seek times of normal hard drives. In this case the SSD is going to be much, much faster.
If you are concerned about bandwidth RAID-0 does better since you can get almost 4x the bandwidth with 4 striped drives compared to one drive if your data accesses are large enough to span all 4 drives. In this case you have to calculate what the aggregate bandwidth of the four drives will be compared to the SSD. I would suspect that they're in the same ballpark in which case the latency advantage would suggest going with the SSD.
Unless your access patterns are mostly lots of sequential huge reads/writes (video streaming or similar) I think the SSD would win.
ubiquibacon
I have to disagree with Jonathan about the usefulness of RAID 0. People have not been doing RAID 0 on their system drives just because... it does yield a noticeable performance increase for any file transfer, though as you already noted, the access time is not improved. There is a lot to be said for fast access time, but there is also a lot to be said for overall transfer rate. You will not notice the transfer rate benefits of a RAID 0 array nearly as much as you would notice the access time benefits of an SSD. SSD will cost a lot more per GB of storage, so if you need lots and lots of space and you are on a budget then SSD might not be for you, but if space is not a major concern and you can afford it SSD is worth it for sure. On my last build I pulled out all the stops and installed 3 120GB Vertex drives in RAID 0. Believe me when I say that RAID 0 is not dead. On my set up I get 0.1ms access times and around 650MBps for my transfer rates... way faster than one SSD could hope do alone.
Jonathan
Personally in this day and age RAID 0 is useless (or has it always been useless?). I am not necessarily going to go into the specifics, but the only advantage RAID 0 offers is a slight access time boost for data specifically located on each disk, but that's about it. Otherwise, striping by itself is useless, and RAID 0 by itself does not offer any parity or redundancy, thus making it not even a true RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive (independent) Disks).
The only benefit here would be that 4x 250 GB disks would give you roughly a terabyte of storage, and there is no terabyte SSD available on the market at the moment. So if storage is your concern, then go ahead and use the RAID to get a terabyte.
Jason Woodson
For access times ssd wins but for sustained data transfers raid 0 with 4 standard will mop the floor of a ssd. Plus, 4 standard drives are cheap these days and in raid 0 you get more space. I'll stay with the good'old standard drives. Plus if they fail they are cheap to replace.