Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[Concillian]

Interesting. if you could, would you expand this or give a readable link or two. I guess I fell into the trap that all RAID was pretty much created equal. Since one of the things on my plate is building a server, and I was planing to incorporate RAID0+1 or RAID5, your implication that there are different RAID solutions with trade-offs between them is something I probably should check out.

Processing demands for Raid 0 or 1 are minimal, when you talk RAID 5, you have to calculate the parity bit and that takes more horsepower. You can probably find some hardware vs. software RAID comparisons at storagereview.com

Interesting. Again, I was under the impression that a RAID1 setup would normally be rebuild-able under any RAID controller since there is no striping involved.

I'm not sure about RAID1. People using onboard RAID are most usually interested in RAID 0.

About all that is left *is* small gains. In the early '80s, improvements were of the 4X, 10X, and bigger jumps (consider going from the 4.bahbahbah MHz 8088 of the PC to the <strike>20</strike> 12MHz 80286 of the AT). Not even in graphics processing do we see such great improvements anymore.

Yeah, but my point is that you have to consider the gain with the tradeoff in reliability from adding more parts to the failure chain (1 more drive, plus a motherboard that you may or may not be able to replace, plus a processor that when it fails you may have to replace to get at your data before you can upgrade).

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=2974&p=5

shows that rel world performance when loading a gaming level is typically less than 1 second difference. Excuse me if I don't run out and buy drives to run RAID 0. FPS improvements from graphics cards are certainly quite a bit more significant than this, and I'd argue significantly more useful to the end user.