Your magazine regularly features articles or letters about the advantages of RAID. I found these articles interesting and based on them, designed and built my new PC, with the specific intention of utilising RAID arrays to make it as fast as possible, within the constraints of my wallet. I decided to use RAID 0 (striping) as I thought that this would allow me to access hard discs more quickly. My primary interests include photography/image editing and music/soundtrack editing, for which I use Adobe’s Photoshop and Audition applications. I also burn a few CD’s using Nero.

At this point, I was going to tell you about my system and all the testing I did, but I realised that you probably weren’t too interested in the details, so:

I have a fairly powerful system, based around a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP/2 mobo, an Intel 3.0GHz Prescott CPU and four SATA 150 Maxtor 160GB HDD’s, plus a pair of PATA 133 discs.

Following a chat with an IT engineer when I took my sons PC in for repair, I decided to run some tests. The engineer stated that in any RAID set-up, the RAID controller was a bottleneck and there was little, if any, gain in read/write speed, particularly on more modern computers.

I was astounded by this claim and decided to run some tests to disprove it. Ha!

After running many tests by dragging and dropping a folder containing several Ghost image files, totalling 12.7 GB, from one drive/array to another drive/array, the results were pretty conclusive. There was no discernible difference whether I copied to a RAID 0 array, or an individual drive. The times were the same within less than three seconds either way and that included a three-drive array.

The only conclusion I can come to, is that on this mobo, with these HDD’s, there is absolutely no advantage in utilising RAID 0. In fact, it would be extremely foolhardy to do so, as there is no time gain or speed premium to be had. If a drive failed however, there is the potential to loose twice as much data, because if a single disc fails, you lose the data from both (or more) discs.

I have to say that I didn’t test the drives to capacity and there are probably many better and more complete testing methods available. Also, SATA 300 drives are now becoming available, that may be faster. I just did the kind of testing appropriate to my way of working.

So it looks as though the IT engineer was right and there is a bottleneck somewhere, probably, as he claimed, in the RAID controller itself.

So I have to ask; what is the point of RAID 0, these days?

I’d be interested in your comments.

Nick Hawryliw