Disk drives are cheap (1.5TB is currently running around $100), but industrial-grade RAID controllers are not. Being that I\u2019m cheap, have an old (4 years is old, right?) system, and just need a bare-minimum amount of reliability I\u2019m looking for the cheapest way to add a couple of mirrored drives. That basically means that I use a \u201cfake RAID\u201d hardware controller or a solution managed completely by Windows. There are various pros and cons to each, but I\u2019ll tell you up front that Windows 7 software RAID was what I chose because of performance & trust.<\/strong> After the break I\u2019ll get to the details as to why.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n RAID Options<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s plenty of advice around on what type of RAID you should use for your particular application. I recommend this Tom\u2019s Hardware Guide write-up<\/a>, and this one is also pretty good.<\/a> In general, hardware RAID is better than both software RAID and so-called \u201cfake RAID\u201d solutions which rely upon a combination of hardware and software. But hardware RAID is expensive and overkill for my needs.<\/p>\n As someone who is not willing to spend the money on a hardware RAID solution, I wanted to determine the performance implications of choosing between the cheap RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) options available to me, along with the other advantages\/disadvantages of each option. If you really want to get into the pros and cons of the solutions below, check out:<\/p>\n Option 1: Microsoft Windows 7 Software RAID<\/em><\/p>\n Windows has built into the OS the ability to RAID disks (since Windows 2000, I believe). The biggest advantages are that it does not require special hardware or drivers as it is completely managed by the Windows OS. This is good because if your motherboard or hard disk controller goes out, you can put those same disks in another Win7 machine and not worry about if the hardware is compatible. Another advantage, if this is important, is that you can RAID at the disk volume level \u2013 the entire disk does not need to be dedicated to a RAID (so you can make good use of unmatched disks). I particularly liked that the management of the disks is built into the Windows \u201cComputer Management\u201d management console.<\/p>\n Option 2: Hardware-Software RAID (a.k.a. Fake RAID)<\/em><\/p>\n Hardware RAID is exactly what it sounds like \u2013 a special hardware controller card manages the disks to provide the striping and\/or redundancy. The key advantage of a full, dedicated hardware RAID is that it requires no software or drivers. That is not the case with \u201cfake RAID\u201d hardware cards that use a combination of special hardware and software to manage the disks. Still, hardware-software RAID should provide some performance advantage over full software RAID. In my testing, however, I did not find that to be the case.<\/span><\/p>\n Performance Testing Methodology & Setup<\/strong><\/p>\n System:<\/em> ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe Motherboard (Socket 478, Intel 865PE),Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Prescott 3.0GHz 1MB L2 Cache, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate<\/p>\n Drives:<\/em> Two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA<\/p>\n I used IOMeter (http:\/\/www.iometer.org\/<\/a>) to test each configuration using the same configuration. My IOMeter configuration file is located here<\/a>. I ran 4 sets of tests; sequential read, sequential write, 70% sequential read + 30% sequential write, and 70% random read + 30% random write. For each test, 1GB of data was read or written in 256KB chunks. Each test was run twice to gain some (limited) measure of trust in the results.<\/p>\n Each test was run on two different hard disk controllers that support RAID: the Intel ICH5R SATA Controller RAID<\/em> that is built into my motherboard and a SIIG SATA 4-channel RAID PCI Card<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>– (Silicon Image Sil3114r5 Chipset)<\/em><\/a> – which I purchased for testing. The SIIG PCI controller was an absolute piece of crap.<\/span> The included management software was buggy as hell on Windows 7, and the performance was atrocious \u2013 roughly 50% slower than the Intel controller in almost all the tests. This is to be expected, since it is a PCI card and doesn\u2019t have the advantage of being as tightly integrated into the processor\u2019s southbridge<\/a>. Plus Windows wouldn\u2019t build a RAID 1 on it so that configuration couldn\u2019t be tested. For that reason, I\u2019m not showing the graphs here but they\u2019re in the attached Excel file<\/a> for the curious.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Results<\/strong><\/p>\n Windows RAID performed just as well, if not better than, the hardware controller RAIDs tested and Windows always incurred the lowest CPU utilization. The results are a mixed bag, where there were some cases where Windows did somewhat better than the Intel RAID and others where the HW solution did slightly better. The key take away from the performance results are that the speeds were all within a few MBps of each other<\/em>, which I consider to be in the noise, while Windows used less CPU consistently<\/em>.<\/p>\n All of the raw data is in this Excel file.<\/a><\/p>\n Sequential Read Tests<\/em><\/p>\n Sequential Write Tests<\/em><\/p>\n Sequential Read\/Write Tests<\/em><\/p>\n Random Read\/Write Tests<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Supposedly <\/em>the main advantage of a fake RAID is that is should perform better than full software RAID, both in the disk transfer rates as well as CPU load. And that may be the case for some configurations, but I did not find that to be the case in my testing. Windows performed just as well as the \u201cfake RAID\u201d with a slightly lower CPU load. Given that I\u2019m more comfortable with the Windows management consoles than the software provided by Intel to manage their RAID, I chose to mirror my drives via Windows RAID 1.<\/p>\n Additional notes<\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t claim that your results will be the same as mine \u2013 I ran these tests because I was curious. If you disagree with the results, or have a different opinion, that\u2019s cool. I\u2019m not here to debate you. I just wanted to share my findings in the hopes that it will be useful for someone else in a similar situation. Please feel to comment if you get a different result or have experience. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How good is Windows 7 software RAID? Is it faster or slower than a cheap hardware controller (aka \u201cfake RAID\u201d)? This past month I\u2019ve realized the simultaneous need to add more hard drive storage and decrease the probability of losing the data stored within. While I fully realize that redundant hard disks are not a … Continue reading RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID vs. inexpensive ‘fake RAID’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[238,237,239,240,118,236,243,242,119,241,193],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-compare","tag-fake-raid","tag-mbps","tag-mirrored","tag-performance","tag-raid","tag-raid-0","tag-raid-1","tag-review","tag-striped","tag-windows-7"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3270,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/3270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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