rec.autos.simulators

I'm asking this here since I'm interested in upgrading mostly for racing GPL
and N4 and am looking for a simple answer if there is one.

I notice a lot of the high end motherboards have a RAID controller built in.
I think I understand what RAID is, but why would I as a gamer (who has no
"mission critical" info on his hard drive) want it?

"mission critical". Hmm, hard disk crashes, you lose your OS, applications,
games, game data (such as car setups), etc. It can take an awfully long time
to restore things to an approximation of what you had before - I guess it
all depends on your definition of mission critical.

Those motherboards can also be used with a more conventional hard disk
config (i.e. no redundancy), so you are not really any worse off, given that
the RAID systems on those motherboards don't add more than a few dollars to
the cost.

Cheers
Hamish

I have one of these you address, the Abit KT7A RAID. I got it becuase it
supports ATA100 and 233mhz FSB. The RAID stuff is just an add-on really, but
the m'boards typically have other desirable high end features. I haven't
decided exactly how to implement the RAID functionality yet, but
theoretically they support 8 IDE devices as a result of having 2 extra IDE
ports. I haven't tried to use them yet either, and to read the manual it
said the RAID ports are the only ATA100 compliant, and the CMOS allows you
to set RAIDATA100 as the First Boot Device, but I haven't pushed it as using
the regular IDE ports having been working fine for now (Ihave an ATA66 CDROM
and an ATA100 HD).

The kicker is that this m'board has been hailed for its overclocking ability
(done at the CMOS screen using CPU timing and multiplyer numbers), so that
may be a reason more and more of them are popping up for these speed hungry
guys with budgets for slower processors.

I got mine because of the ability (if it is in the future) to take advantage
of ATA 100 and a 233mhz FSB.

Best of luck,

edb

With a hardware RAID0 implementation (disk striping only, not for fault
tolerance) you can actually use two indentical drives as ONE drive, so they
can share the burden of read/write operations, i.e. one drive reads while
the other writes.  I have a friend that has such a RAID implementation and
he says the speed gains are tremendous.  Mind you, this does not provide
data redundancy, so your data is not protected by virtue of RAID.  I have
yet to try it, but if you have the means I suggest  you try it out,
especially if you do full installations of your games to the hard disk.

Luis

I just built a system around a KT7A-RAID motherboard and used the RAID
controller in a RAID 0 setup.  In games like Q3A, UT, and Halflife, the
levels load much faster.  In N4, the tracks load in about 60% of the time
normally required.  Basically, RAID 0 helps with the performance of one of
the biggest bottlenecks in a computer.

Also, I am dual booting Win2K with Me.  I installed Me first, copied my I386
directory to my Hard drive(s) and did the Win2K install from there.  It was
by far the absolute fastest install of Win2K I have ever seen.  I was at a
desktop in 20 minutes!!!!

For the cost of an extra hard drive and the 25 bucks or so extra on the
motherboard, in my opinion, the RAID option is the way to go.

Russ, MCSE

http://www.amdzone.com/#11

Abit Update
       Reported by: Chris Tom      At: 7:59 AM  Source: phone  
Well Abit just called me from Taiwan. Yep, at about 6:30am, sleepy,
can't type. Anyway, they requested that I remove Alan's post with the
e-mail from AMD about their KT7 series being removed from AMD's
recommended list, which it has. I am supposed to receive some official
update about the situation later today. Apparently it involves some
changes in AMD's testing procedure. Unfortunately I can not speak from
experience with their KT7, KT7 RAID, KT7A, or KT7A RAID, the boards
which I assume were the potential boards removed from the AMD list,
since I have been unable to get test samples of these boards. If you
wish to know the status of these boards stay tuned and we will post
details later, or check out our forum for peoples experience with
these boards. I did test the KA7, which I did approve of.

This is pretty cryptic, Nos. Can you explain what he means? Where you privy
to the post he's referring to? It's hard to believe because the KT7A has
been reviewed by a lot of sites and no one has mentioned anything bad about
it. Can you elaborate?

You can connect two (or more) hard drives to the RAID for "Striping" (RAID
0), it splits the load to the two hard drives so it reads and rights very
fast. This is used a lot for video editing on a PC (I have mine setup this
way to edit video and a separate drive for OS and games). I don't know if it
will make much difference during game play because most new drives are fast
enough, but loading will be a lot faster.
The other setup for RAID is "mirroring" (RAID 1) and the same data is
written to two or more drives so that if one drive fails, you still have it
on the other. It is not any faster this way and is mostly for businesses
that want the extra safety of storing data to multiple drives.
Lutrell

Depends on who you speak to though. I know not of the RAID
controller embedded on these mainboards, but more expensive
RAID solutions will decide which drives heads are nearer the
location of the data on the drive and pull it from there.
Seek time is the real killer with drives.

Write operations are no faster, but read operations can
be sped up enough to be noticeable.

But of course you're halving the capacity running RAID 1,
not a solution that most home machines opt for.

Cheers,
Rod.

Sshhh...it's Jag, not Nos.
Go to the link I posted.  http://www.amdzone.com/#11
I'm just passing along information that I came across for anyone
considering purchasing an Abit mb for use with an AMD cpu.
If you go to AMD's certified mb site you will indeed see there are no
Abit mb's listed. I don't even have an AMD cpu.
It's probably something minor too, just passing along the info.

That would be me. <g> Seriously, I did my research and didn't hear a hint
about any of this until the order was placed. I'm not worried about it, but
I would like more informatoin and the site you mentoin above isn't that
informative.

I looked for this at amd.com but didn't find it. Do you have the URL handy?

Thanks for the info, Jagg. I just wonder what it means.

RAID offers increases in speed and redundancy.

There are "basically" 3 configurations you might consider using for ***.

You can have an ATA RAID (Promise Technologies IDE Raid), or you can have
the more expensive but higher performing SCSI RAID. Onboard RAID is usually
Promise's IDE config. so we'll go into that for now:

1) RAID 0 (known as striping) - This allows "multiple disk spanning" In
other words... you can combine 2 HDD to act as one, with the advantages of
having 2 mechanical devides doing different thing simultaneously. It's a
sort-of copy of the traditional SCSI architecture which allows you to
read/write simultaneously with a single drive (big performance increases).
However, IDE RAID achieves this by juggling responsibilities (read/write)
between the two drives, and synchronizing.

requirements: 2 IDE HDD (same size)

2) RAID 1 (known as mirroring). - This simply allows for a "real-time
backup" onto another HDD. Useful for redundancy, but not much good for
performance (load times, etc.).

requirements: 2 IDE HDD (same size)

3) RAID 10 (first mirrored, then striped) - This is the best, but most
expensive solution. You get instant redundancy by mirroring, but you add 2
more HDD, and span the remaining two to the mirrors. Which the result is
higher performance, and even if 1 HDD fails, you still have that striping on
the other mirror. Which is ultimate peace of mind. It is the best of both
worlds.

requirements: 4 IDE HDD (same size)

RAID is a nice way to go if it's there, but SCSI as a whole is better
performing (1 disk is as efficient/fast as 2 IDE HDD in IDE RAID). You add
SCSI RAID to the equation, you'll see another increase in
performance/redundancy, since you can "hotswap them" (just rip out the
broken HDD, replace it, reboot, and it'll auto-restore in the background
while your OS is running). Although, SCSI is again more expensive as a
whole.

That's my 2 cents, hope I helped a bit.

Cheers,

Schumi

Depends wholly on the controller and drives attached. Just because it's
SCSI, doesn't mean it's hotswappable.

But I can't understand your definition of hotswap if you're suggesting
that the machine needs to be rebooted?

Provided the drive can be hotswapped (and a redundant RAID level is
used), the controller will start rebuilding the drive without the
neccessity of rebooting the machine, transparently to the OS (the
controller may send a trap error to the OS to inform the operator of a
status change of the drive - depending on the controller).

Cheers,
Rod.

There's that darned IDE RAID/SCSI RAID mixup in my explanation again.

They are so different, yet so alike in use, that I get mixed up during
explanation.

You are absolutely right about hotswapable SCSI RAID not requiring a reboot,
and again correct on the "hot-swapable" portion too regarding Controller
Card compliance. However, I only use Mylex controllers, which hot-swap is
basically a standard feature :)

Guess after re-reading my comments, I plugged SCSI a bit harder than
requested, when the topic was IDE RAID. My apologies if I confused a few,
and thanks Rod for the correction.

Cheers,

Schumi

Yuk. Still being required to repair Digital Servers with
the 3 channel Mylex controllers, I sympathise. ;)

Had too many cases where the failed drive on a BA356
wasn't neccessarily the faulty drive running on a Mylex. Just
last week had a replacement drive come up as a standby when
it was replaced, used daccf to clear and redo the config
and it just blew away everything. Something that's 'not meant
to happen' ;/

But my experience with the Mylex stopped with the premature
death of the Prioris Server.

But give me a SmartArray over a Mylex anyday! ;)

Cheers,
Rod.