Most recent edit on 2003-06-21 20:18:36 by RichardBerg

Additions:
TheNeed
TheCompromise
TheTrick
TheMethodology
TheTests
LocalityNote
SomeTerminology

Deletions:

The Need

Ars reviewed its first ATA RAID controller∞ in 1999, and in the intervening years these devices have generated quite a bit of hoopla, to the point of becoming nearly standard issue on aftermarket motherboards. It's comparatively rare, however, that someone steps back from the charts and graphs and wonders "what is it all good for?"

Most people know that slapping together a couple drives in level 0 will let them load their CounterStrike maps and save their Photoshop documents faster so long as they don't mind daily sacrifices to the gods of MTBF. Based on the questions often posed to the OpenForum∞, however, it's not so widely known what advantages ATA RAID provides for average desktop usage or in various server environments. The unfortunate answer for the former crowd is, of course, "not much" -- by far the most cost-effective innovations to come to this market segment recently are the optimized caches with which manufacturers have been able to drastically ramp up performance for pennies on the GB.

[this is asked often enough that I wrote up a quick tech piece on the hows & whys involved; lemme know if you want this fleshed out and if so in what form]

[followup: I made some contacts at WD about Ars doing a "blackpaper" on their caching tech, but haven't heard from them in awhile...will pursue this angle again after I'm done with RAID]

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Edited on 2003-06-21 20:16:33 by RichardBerg

Additions:
TheReality

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Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2003-06-21 20:16:26 by RichardBerg []

The Need

Ars reviewed its first ATA RAID controller∞ in 1999, and in the intervening years these devices have generated quite a bit of hoopla, to the point of becoming nearly standard issue on aftermarket motherboards. It's comparatively rare, however, that someone steps back from the charts and graphs and wonders "what is it all good for?"

Most people know that slapping together a couple drives in level 0 will let them load their CounterStrike maps and save their Photoshop documents faster so long as they don't mind daily sacrifices to the gods of MTBF. Based on the questions often posed to the OpenForum∞, however, it's not so widely known what advantages ATA RAID provides for average desktop usage or in various server environments. The unfortunate answer for the former crowd is, of course, "not much" -- by far the most cost-effective innovations to come to this market segment recently are the optimized caches with which manufacturers have been able to drastically ramp up performance for pennies on the GB.

[this is asked often enough that I wrote up a quick tech piece on the hows & whys involved; lemme know if you want this fleshed out and if so in what form]

[followup: I made some contacts at WD about Ars doing a "blackpaper" on their caching tech, but haven't heard from them in awhile...will pursue this angle again after I'm done with RAID]