Why is there Out-of-Control Geek Talk at 2am! #0.8x8 (Enter at your own risk!)

Good afternoon from Kendra Wilkinson-Baskett

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #12098678
So, RAID can be "Mirrored" or "Striped" right?

Advantages / Disadvantages of each flavor?

-> If you have a RAID array that mirrors drives it will take time to rebuild the array.
If you have one that uses 2 drives as one, if one drive fails all is gone.

If you want data security, get something like a home server and back up to it regularly.
I recently made use of the backup feature on mine... it's also useful to migrate a computer from one HDD to another as someone else once pointed out (that's what I used it for - allowed me to swap HDDs while keeping the old system, just in case)

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #12098678
So, RAID can be "Mirrored" or "Striped" right?

Advantages / Disadvantages of each flavor?

Mirrored is Raid 1. It is when you have in it's most simple form 2 drives. When you write to one drive, the exact same data is written to the other, so essentially they are identical copies of one another. Thus why the term mirrored is used. So if one dies you have a second copy.

In a striped array (there are various forms, 3, 5, 6 and a few others) you have 3 or more harddrives, for the example I'll say Raid 5 (one of the more popular) you will split up the different blocks among all the harddrives. So looking at the picture below, you have A1, A2 and A3 which are all part of one stripe, and the Ap which is the parity for the A stripe. So if any of the other 3 drives fails, the drive with the parity will step in and help rebuild the array. In Raid 3 there is a dedicated drive that is the parity for all stripes. In Raid 6 you have 2 parities for every stripe so you have an extra layer of protection.

DetlevCM wrote in post #12098702
Well, you will have your current files on it as well - and I recently found a potential SSD killer - Virtual Machines, every time you suspend them they write to the SSD.

Besides that, if I buy a SSD for 400€ I'd like it to last - possibly longer than a HDD. (especially in a laptop where HDDs are prone to failure due to impacts)
I don't want to be forced to buy a new SSD just because the manufacturers could increase their profit by selling me inferior technology.
(and yes, I view the 25/20nm NAND as inferior because it has fewer write cycles compared to 34nm NAND, the solution might be to go SLC flash (up to 100.000 write cycles) instead of MLC flash, but then the SLC SSDs cost a lot more for a lot less space, the 64GB Intel costs more than twice as much compared to the 160GB G2)

On the Intel G2 I don't worry about write cycles - but when I hear reduced to 3000-4000 max...hmm, that doesn't sound too good any more.
Yes, it is still a lot, but those people who really benefit from a SSD are those that read and write a lot of data, i.e. those that will use up those cycles the quickest.

I also saw a comment once that small writes wear out the drive more quickly - i.e. sub 4K writes, but I couldn't find it again, apparently 2TB of that could be enough to wear out an Intel G2... Mine has reached 6,7TB (yikes, I seem to be speeding up) and I've had it since the end of November 2009 - so nearly 1,5 years now, and I'm not the heaviest user.

Well most people don't use virtual machines.

Also, it's not about the fact a SSD won't last longer, but in 10 years SSD speeds are going to be way faster than they are now. The increases in performance on SSD's are much greater than they were with physical disks, so they really do need to be upgraded more often.

Honesty, some people just worry too much about SSD's and them failing. Just use the dang thing, it's less likely to fail than most of your other components anyway, and if you are smart everything that you need that is on that drive will be backed up anyway, that and most of the time it's just and OS and programs so there is very little critical data.

*sigh* wrote in post #12098713
Mirrored is Raid 1. It is when you have in it's most simple form 2 drives. When you write to one drive, the exact same data is written to the other, so essentially they are identical copies of one another. Thus why the term mirrored is used. So if one dies you have a second copy.

In a striped array (there are various forms, 3, 5, 6 and a few others) you have 3 or more harddrives, for the example I'll say Raid 5 (one of the more popular) you will split up the different blocks among all the harddrives. So looking at the picture below, you have A1, A2 and A3 which are all part of one stripe, and the Ap which is the parity for the A stripe. So if any of the other 3 drives fails, the drive with the parity will step in and help rebuild the array. In Raid 3 there is a dedicated drive that is the parity for all stripes. In Raid 6 you have 2 parities for every stripe so you have an extra layer of protection.

(From wiki)

So in Raid 3 and Raid 5 you can afford for one drive to die to rebuild, in 6 you can afford for 2 to die before rebuilding.

I think the diagrams on the wiki page make it a bit more simple to understand. Wiki

On a side note:
-> You can also use a Linux flavour to have a form of "software RAID" that would allow you to copy files to more than just 1 drive.
I.e. you could have each drive mirrored to two drives per software.

On this note, Windows Home Server 1 uses a drive extender - great for storage: more flexible than RAID, just add any HDD you want.

On that note, do you need equal HDDs for RAID 6? Because with the Home Server's Drive extender I can use any drive I like on any interface to expand the storage pool.

DetlevCM wrote in post #12098709
-> If you have a RAID array that mirrors drives it will take time to rebuild the array.
If you have one that uses 2 drives as one, if one drive fails all is gone.

If you want data security, get something like a home server and back up to it regularly.
I recently made use of the backup feature on mine... it's also useful to migrate a computer from one HDD to another as someone else once pointed out (that's what I used it for - allowed me to swap HDDs while keeping the old system, just in case)

Well there is no mirrored or striped raid array that uses two drives as one. That's raid 0 which isn't truly a Raid anyway.

But yes, a true backup is absolutely required, but redundency in a system isn't a bad idea either. It's going to be a lot faster to rebuild a Raid 5 array when one of the 2tb drives kicked out then transferring over 3-4x's thats from a home server.

DetlevCM wrote in post #12098728
On a side note:
-> You can also use a Linux flavour to have a form of "software RAID" that would allow you to copy files to more than just 1 drive.
I.e. you could have each drive mirrored to two drives per software.

On this note, Windows Home Server 1 uses a drive extender - great for storage: more flexible than RAID, just add any HDD you want.

On that note, do you need equal HDDs for RAID 6? Because with the Home Server's Drive extender I can use any drive I like on any interface to expand the storage pool.

I would avoid Software raid at all costs. If you want raid do it right.

Using something like that drive extender would scare me, because if you can truly mix and match harddrives then there is no guarantee that there is redundancy to all of that data. That and even if there was it's performance would be terrible compared to raid 5 or raid 6 because there would be a lot more overhead to manage all of that.

For all of the striped raids, you want as similar of harddrives as possible, but like we have a 4 x 1.5tb WD Caviar Black array at work, one failed and we got a 2tb as a replacement. It is seen as a 1.5tb drive, but it works just fine.

*sigh* wrote in post #12098725
Well most people don't use virtual machines.

Also, it's not about the fact a SSD won't last longer, but in 10 years SSD speeds are going to be way faster than they are now. The increases in performance on SSD's are much greater than they were with physical disks, so they really do need to be upgraded more often.

Honesty, some people just worry too much about SSD's and them failing. Just use the dang thing, it's less likely to fail than most of your other components anyway, and if you are smart everything that you need that is on that drive will be backed up anyway, that and most of the time it's just and OS and programs so there is very little critical data.

Well, you are right that speed increase - but what is important are the 4K speeds

And depending on what you do, the compressed "up to" speeds of the sandforce things doesn't help you in any way either. E.g. if you work with video which is already compressed if it comes out of a DSLR...

Test the random read write speeds an Intel G2 - they are still pretty high:

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*sigh* wrote in post #12098739
Well there is no mirrored or striped raid array that uses two drives as one. That's raid 0 which isn't truly a Raid anyway.

But yes, a true backup is absolutely required, but redundency in a system isn't a bad idea either. It's going to be a lot faster to rebuild a Raid 5 array when one of the 2tb drives kicked out then transferring over 3-4x's thats from a home server.

Well, you store the data on the home server which does the data management for you.
You just back up the system drive with current files.

*sigh* wrote in post #12098748
I would avoid Software raid at all costs. If you want raid do it right.

Using something like that drive extender would scare me, because if you can truly mix and match harddrives then there is no guarantee that there is redundancy to all of that data. That and even if there was it's performance would be terrible compared to raid 5 or raid 6 because there would be a lot more overhead to manage all of that.

For all of the striped raids, you want as similar of harddrives as possible, but like we have a 4 x 1.5tb WD Caviar Black array at work, one failed and we got a 2tb as a replacement. It is seen as a 1.5tb drive, but it works just fine.

On the downside, good RAID costs a lot
And yes, software raid will guarantee redundancy, that's the point of Windows Home Server.
Overhead - maybe, on the performance side: You can apparently saturate 1GBit/s LAN with a Windows Home Server, I'm stuck to g Wi-Fi though (good enough for me, it's not as if I regularly transfer large amounts of data - just every now and then, and then I can spare the time).

On this note:
I think the RAID debate is partially also a debate of let me say "religions" - some people will avoid RAID at all costs, other will not use anything else.
I personally would prefer a software solution - at least on Windows Home Server 1 it works well, gets the job done, oh, and every drive individually is readable as well, so let's assume you are really unlucky and the electronics of all drives are destroyed -> the data can be recovered from each drive individually without the home server.

Look at SSD speeds from 5 years ago, even 4k write speeds, they are NOTHING compared to what they are now. No performance minded person is going to use a SSD for 5+ years, it just isn't going to happen.

Also, if you are buying a new HDD because it's too slow for a 10% increase in speed, why would you not buy a new SSD in 2-3 years when it offers double the performance? Sure they are expensive now, so is almost every other component in your system.

Also, you are right sequential are the main focus, doesn't mean random writes aren't improving either (which they are). Also, for a dedicated OS/Program drive (what most SSD's are used for) read speeds are more important than write speeds.


Motherboards, video cards, and ram are several other things I can think of that are more likely to fail on your laptop than your SSD.

DetlevCM wrote in post #12098778
Well, you store the data on the home server which does the data management for you.
You just back up the system drive with current files.

Honestly, I have no idea what that has to do with what I said. Dumping data on a home server is NOT data management. A file system and how you back up that data is data management. Redundency has nothing to do with data management, but it will help you get back up and running a lot faster than a backup will.

DetlevCM wrote in post #12098778
On the downside, good RAID costs a lot
And yes, software raid will guarantee redundancy, that's the point of Windows Home Server.
Overhead - maybe, on the performance side: You can apparently saturate 1GBit/s LAN with a Windows Home Server, I'm stuck to g Wi-Fi though (good enough for me, it's not as if I regularly transfer large amounts of data - just every now and then, and then I can spare the time).

On this note:
I think the RAID debate is partially also a debate of let me say "religions" - some people will avoid RAID at all costs, other will not use anything else.
I personally would prefer a software solution - at least on Windows Home Server 1 it works well, gets the job done, oh, and every drive individually is readable as well, so let's assume you are really unlucky and the electronics of all drives are destroyed -> the data can be recovered from each drive individually without the home server.

On for example the X58 chipset the raid controller is the same one used on some of the higher end Intel Raid Cards, so it costs NO MORE than a software based raid, yet the performance is better and there is less overhead on your system to run it.

Software raid is TERRIBLE, sure it may be "easy to use" but honestly so is a hardware based raid, but at least you have control over everything.


Also, that home server setup if every drive is seperate, doesn't sound like a raid at all, so you have NO redundancy at all, which is fine, but it has nothing to do with Raid.

That and there is no way I would every trust my data to a Microsoft solution.. Heck no!

*sigh* wrote in post #12098780
Look at SSD speeds from 5 years ago, even 4k write speeds, they are NOTHING compared to what they are now. No performance minded person is going to use a SSD for 5+ years, it just isn't going to happen.

Also, if you are buying a new HDD because it's too slow for a 10% increase in speed, why would you not buy a new SSD in 2-3 years when it offers double the performance? Sure they are expensive now, so is almost every other component in your system.

Also, you are right sequential are the main focus, doesn't mean random writes aren't improving either (which they are). Also, for a dedicated OS/Program drive (what most SSD's are used for) read speeds are more important than write speeds.


Motherboards, video cards, and ram are several other things I can think of that are more likely to fail on your laptop than your SSD.

Well, the stupid people who need to buy the newest and greatest because they have too much money to waste will always buy what they can find.

But looking at HDDs - the differences will be more noticeable than a SSD.
Can you tell whether your SSD reads at 30MB/s or 25MB/s? (random 4K)
No.
Can you tell if your drive reads at 1MB/s or 1,2MB/s - most likely yes.

The fact that numbers are larger in benchmarks doesn't mean you'll be able to actively notice the difference. On a side note, often when you replaced your HDD you could then use it as an external storage drive. On that note: I've only ever actively replaced one HDD in a laptop - because the old one was in a bad shape (+2 warranty replacements in my first laptop which don't count, same drive)

And about other things to fail:
Video cards shouldn't fail - there is nothing that can fail there (except if it is an NVidia 8 series which I don't use though I have it, I use an Intel integrated card, nothing to fail there)
RAM - shouldn't fail either, no moving parts, nothing that can fail.

tonyniev wrote in post #12098703
Good afternoon from Kendra Wilkinson-Baskett

Wet Republic at MGM Grand

I LUV KENDRA! READ HER TELL ALL book it's freakin insane and I promise you there are a few chapters men in particular would like, she tells about EVERYTHING in the playboy mansion!

tonyniev wrote in post #12098703
Good afternoon from Kendra Wilkinson-Baskett

Wet Republic at MGM Grand

nice pics Tony, colour looks real good

My husband is considering a SSD mac vs the normal ones. I didn't get the SSD because for the $2,000 price range, it was slower then the HDD one.