Intel and Laptop RAID?

Might E. Mouse writes "The next version of Centrino, codenamed Napa, will support RAID. Intel is pushing it as a great way for business users to have added reliability and data backup on their work notebooks. Should boost gaming performance too. Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array? "

Comments

WTF for?

[HEbGb]

Forgive my ignorance, but why on earth would anyone want RAID on their laptop? If you really need to protect your data, nightly backups should be quite sufficient.

Re:WTF for?

[nacturation]

Um... redundancy? A backup is great until your hard drive dies, then you have a useless hunk of metal while you source a new drive, restore from backup, etc.

BTW, I'll humbly mention that I predicted this a year and a half ago, so at least there's prior art should they patent "RAID on a laptop".

Re:WTF for?

[nacturation]

If you have data that important on a laptop, it should be backed up to something else-- DVD, thumbdrive, pocket-size USB HDD, etc. Having a second drive in the laptop means that whatever ills befall your laptop, also befall your backup.

RAID doesn't replace a backup. You still need to run backups. All it means is that if one drive fails, you can still keep working as it won't affect the entire machine.

Which would you rather have?

1. A single hard drive, fully backed up, such that if it were to fail you would suffer a 100% loss in productivity on your system until you had a chance to replace the drive and rebuild everything. Or...
2. Two hard drives configured in a mirror, also fully backed up, such that if one drive failed the other drive takes up the slack and you can finish whatever you were working on. Later, you take the laptop in for service to replace the damaged drive having lost zero productivity in the meantime.

I know which I would choose.

Re:WTF for?

[chhupa_rustam]

It has nothing to do with RAID-on-laptops -- this is a strategic move because Intel's planning to use Centrino-like chips in servers pretty soon, as highlighted here (and in other, better articles): http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/12/technology/intel.r eut/

Intel has a good chance of consolidating the underlying infrastructure across all their product lines, which would be a massive win and really benefit from economies of scale.

Re:WTF for?

[saintp]

Actually, it would be due to generous amounts of sudden decelleration. I'd be very surprised if any of them experienced more gravity than you or I.

Re:WTF for?

[toddbu]

I'd love to have RAID in a laptop, but I've always thought about the weight/power problem as well. What I like about RAID is being able to replace a bad drive without having to rebuild the entire machine. I had a drive go bad a while back and it took me four days to order a new part and a 1/2 day to rebuild the box. I've had RAIDed drives go bad on my desktop and I just order another drive and install it in no time flat.

I don't think that the loss of data argument is as compelling as the loss of use argument. Imagine traveling to overseas and your hard drive dies. Unless you can find a repair shop that you think you can trust, you could be out of a machine for several days. RAID would help mitigate that problem.

Re:WTF for?

[nacturation]

Once again, RAID is not for backup purposes. Having a mirrored RAID means you can still use your machine if one hard drive dies. A lot of good your flash drive will do you if your hard drive dies and you need to finish that presentation on the flight. Unless someone's kind enough to loan you *their* laptop so you can keep working, you're going to be screwed. And if you're really lucky they might also have OpenOffice.org installed so that you can open your files. Hopefully you're not doing anything more complex than typically office stuff or you're really fubared. Wouldn't you have rather put up with a few extra ounces to have that reliability in the first place?

And really, iPods come with huge hard drives and most people have no problem lugging those around on top of everything else. As for burning your leg, you would have burnt your leg severely on those room-sized computers they had decades ago. Fortunately, technology matures from the heavy, slow, and inefficient and becomes light, fast, and efficient. So what was once thought of as stupid becomes commonplace and expected.

Re:WTF for?

[mollog]

I've read through many of these posts, and posters have come up with many reasons why.

Preserve important data.

Improve 'up time'.

Improve performance.

Ease maintenance.

One poster mentions the use of this technology in blade servers along with low heat processor technology. I think that's a good observation; RAID on 'laptop' technology will allow for better imbedded computers, especially with low cost drives.

As for the argument that there are lots of single-point-of-failure in a laptop, the disk drive is the most unreliable point and it affects the most critical, hard to replace part of a computing system - data.

Re:WTF for?

[Draknor]

I've got an $1900 bill from Ontrack Data Recovery sitting next to me that would explain the situation nicely. In the business world, not everyone is a tech-savvy geek with a broadband connection or a secure backup technique.

And how would having RAID on your laptop prevented that bill? Let's take a look:

1. If you use RAID-0, you get increased performance but 50% higher chance of failure. Wouldn't have helped, so the rest of this assumes RAID-1

2. Assuming failure was caused by dropped laptop: Minor chance that second drive would have survived when first one didn't.

3. Assuming failure was caused by spilled beverage burning out the drive: Again, minor chance that second drive wouldn't have been affected as well.

4. Assuming failure was caused by overheating of machine: If both drives are the same model their tolerances would similar, so again there's a minor chance the second drive would have survived.

5. Assuming failure was due to drive just going bad: Very good chance second drive would have survived, assuming this was some kind of manufacturing defect/bad component, and not brought about by usage & environmental conditions.

So out of 4 scenarios, only 1 gives you a good chance that having a RAID-1 array would have saved you. And what does RAID-1 cost you?
1. Decreased battery life
2. Increased heat
3. Larger case
4. More weight
5. More expensive

Let's take a look at your other options:

1. USB flash memory - quick, small, pretty reliable. Great for datasets 512 MB; very little power usage.

2. CDRW - Available standard on most commercial laptops. Burns a backup CD in about 10 minutes, start to finish. Good solution for datasets 700 mb. Can carry backup/restore CD if you needed to rebuild on the road. Downside: CDs can be easy to scratch, although slim cases can protect against that in not much more space than the CD itself. Uses power when it's running, but otherwise little (if any) power draw.

3. USB 2.0 Hard Drive: Using a laptop HD and a 2.5" case, you can get good performance in a small, external package. Plug in once a day, do your backup, unplug it & put it back in your bag. A little more expensive than options 1 & 2, a little larger, but can get you much higher capacity (80gb now for 2.5" HDs?), and as a bonus, you get an extra drive you could swap in if your main drive fails. This also uses roughly equivalent power to a RAID array when you're using it, but if you just do backups on it then it's not running constantly.

These are all widely-available technologies available right now, that you don't have to be a "tech-savvy geek" to use - everything supports drag & drop.

I'm not saying RAID doesn't have any place at all in laptops - I just don't see the advantage of it for most business/home-class users; and I don't think data redundancy is as big of a factor as some think it would be.

Re:WTF for?

[chavo valdez]

Then you would just buy a different laptop. You would be free to choose another make or model that didn't have these features.

Yes that's right gentlemen and ladies(?). You will not be forced to carry the same laptop as everyone else. I know this is now the case. I predict that there will be several companies offering laptops of different sizes, weights, cpu's, storage space, graphic cards, etc., etc., etc.

Hard to believe but true. The future is looking so bright!

Works for me... but...

[MSFanBoi]

I'd rather an ATi video, but it all sounds good to me. I think in the next 2 years we will be witnessing the death of desktop PC's and replacement with laptops in most circumstances as costs get closer and designs merge.

Re:Works for me... but...

[the_mighty_$]

I think in the next 2 years we will be witnessing the death of desktop PC's and replacement with laptops in most circumstances as costs get closer and designs merge.

I, for one, will not welcome our laptop overlords until laptop manufacturors come up with a single set of standards. I want to be able to customize my laptop the same way I can customize my whitebox PC.

Work backups

[kevin_conaway]

In a workplace environment, you should not trust your users (or their machines) with their own backups. I like the situation at my workplace:

If we're plugged into the corporate network, we have software running that will periodically backup everything you place in your 'My Documents' folder or some other such folder. Users know that if they want something backed up, they put their data there.

Re:Work backups

[bombadillo]

Raid is not for backups. Raid is intended to keep the machine running in the event of a hardware failure.

Re:Work backups

[dusanv]

Moderators on crack strike again:

This is the acceleration they feel by sitting sill on a table for example.
 
If you're sitting still, you are NOT, I repeat, NOT accelerating. I almost wet my pants reading this. Also, when they fall, they acclerate exatcly at 9.81 m/s^2. They would accelerate more on Jupiter but here on Earth, it's roughly 9.81.

Why do this?

[dreold]

More weight, more things to break, less battery life...

Nothing beats proper backup and/or syncing tools and procedure.

Interesting... somewhat

[digitalgimpus]

I have a Pentium 4M in a Thinkpad.

I have had 2 HD's (non-raid) for a couple years now. One of which is a 7200 RPM drive.

I don't think this would work as a RAID for power reasons. Unless some new battery technology really takes off... how could this be viable? I couldn't imagine if both drives were used at the same time. My laptop is normally plugged in (that's when I use the 2nd HD). But unplugged... it would be a nightmare.

Until nuclear batteries are perfected... this is vaporware in my mind.

Re:Interesting... somewhat

[cerelib]

I totally agree. The power and noise generated by this extra spinning of the hard drive just sounds contrary to the whole Centrino=MoreBatteryLife scheme. On top of that not many people have huge amounts of storage on their laptop to facilitate a good RAID config.

Don't forget...

[rhsanborn]

...a 10lb. addition because you have 4 disks attached to the bottom of your laptop, and I hope you can strap the battery to your back because its going to go quick spinning more than one drive.

RAID isn't all about redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow hard drive speeds are one of the chief bottlenecks to performance on laptops. Setting up a RAID 0 configuration would give you some added speed.

Sounds unnecessary ..

[guacamole]

If I needed to backup a laptop, I'd just buy a $30 external USB or Firewire enclosure and a hard drive and look for software that can do incremental backups. Having an additional hard drive inside of laptop spinning all the time only adds more cost, weight, and power consumption..

Battery life

[toadgee]

So basically any power that may have been saved from their new chipsets (IIRC they were better on power consumption) can now be bypassed by adding another hard drive. And with networked docking stations at the company that routinely perform network backups, I wonder how big the target audience is for mobile RAID devices. Pretty soon we'll see notebook computers that are just as big as desktops -- multiple hard drives, huge monitors, etc. I was sitting next to a lady on a flight about a year ago that reached under her seat and after about 5 minutes of thrashing about, pulled out this 17" widescreen notebook that must have weighed about 20 lbs, as when she put it on the "tray table", it looked like it was about to snap from all of the pressure. I'm quite content with my 12" laptop for travel use, as it only weighs about 5 lbs.

Ass Backwards

[Bobartig]

To increase the reliability of your data backup, you need to move it to a medium that is more stable than the original copies. It also needs to be remote from the original. If you're working on a laptop, having the data striped on your laptop is of hardly any use. Flood, fire, electrical surge, theft, accidental damage will all happily destroy both copies of your data, since they're in the same place.

Now where would I like to see a laptop raid? In a mobile media workstation! Video editors, sound guys, they'd love the extra throughput of a raid 0 that fits in their briefcase.

Re:About Time.

[OrangeTide]

More than likely it will be a controller failure or software failure that destroys his data. RAID won't protect you from that. It's important to install automatic backup software on all of Mr. Marketing's computers. There are some remote back-up packages for Windows that even work over dial-up. (although more than likely Mr. Marketing will be in a hotel with broadband when he's on the road).

I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid state?

[PhYrE2k2]

First off, RAID-1 (I imagine they won't have >2 drives in a notebook) will not increase speed, as it's just a mirror- a write takes the same time, writing to both drives equally. A read generally only pulls from one drive at a time. If they have >2 drives, you could get some increased speed from the drive to the controller.

Second, won't this be bad for battery life having a second 4200RPM drive in your notebook? Not to mention weight?

Third, any money says it'll use the onboard memory for its RAID controller or maybe even software RAID, meaning it, like onboard video will slow your computer down.

For an argument for it, lets turn to my former partner:

Any video card must keep the monitor refreshed. That means reading the entire video buffer at whatever the refresh frequency is.

Let's say you're running 1024x768, 16bpp, 75Hz. This is quite conservative, obviously. Bandwidth consumption? Well the video buffer is 1024x768x2 bytes = 1.5MB. Read it 75 times per second and you are eating 112.5MB/s of your main memory bandwidth. You just lost 14MHz of your RAM clock speed.

Picking some more realistic numbers: 1280x1024, 32bpp, 85Hz. This is a much more typical configuration. Bandwidth consumption here... video buffer is 5.0MB, read 85 times per second == 425MB/s. You've now lost about 53MHz of your RAM clock speed.

These numbers assume that the video card is doing nothing but refreshing the screen. Obviously that's not realistic. If you're just typing a document then you're likely pushing about 10MB/s thru the video card. But as soon as you start scrolling the screen, running Flash applications or anything with any animation to it (and we know WinXP is FULL of CPU-hogging animations) the memory bandwidth loss skyrockets.

This doesn't seem to make much sense. In an age of GBe and 10GBe ethernet, wi-max, storage of files across corporate networks over the Internet, why is RAID in a laptop useful?

Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger

-M

Mac OS X disk utility image but on hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

So, people this is or may not be a raid solution when running on batteries, but also a dynamic array creation. Once in the office, the docking station with the second hard drive could start building the mirror of the primary hard drive just in case.

If the hard drive crashes, at least you can be up and running by just using the docking station. Data not backed up and of vital importance could be recover in the meantime.

This is not about laptops

[ocelotbob]

The laptop market right now is all about making things as small as possible. A RAID setup would require a system that is much larger than current offerings to work. IMO, this is more about the server market. Small, low power consumption servers, maybe even fitting two mobos in a single 1u chassis. Such a market obviously exists, but up until very recently, there hasn't been a chipset that could realistically do the job of a server. This is what this product is really about, not the laptop market.

What? That's unprofitable?

[phorm]

Why do you think laptops aren't as upgradable. When it dies just past the warrantee period, or a part fails, you either have to pay a premium to acquire/have-installed the new part, or replace the whole machine. Plus you have to pay the big bucks for a real machine because your lower-end video card sucks but is in reality only $50 cheaper.

Profit for them, sucks to be us... why would they change it?

RAID is dead weight with write caching!

[KonoWatakushi]

Until manufacturers start producing disks that behave well, and the OS supports it properly, RAID is probably a waste. Granted, you are less likely to lose power on a laptop, but it can still happen, and your file system will trash your data for you! Having two sets of data which may easily become incoherent probably makes raid more of a liability than an advantage.

As it stands today, 95% (probably more) of disks are completely unsafe to use if you value your data. While you may take comfort in having a journalling, or otherwise atomic file system, beware, it does not work properly with write caching!

Before this problem is addressed, any sort of ATA raid is laughable. Theoretically, this problem should be solved when all drives and controllers support NCQ, but I'm not holding my breath; there is still an option which allows discs to lie about the completion of commands, and if there is _any_ performance benefit, I'm betting the disc manufacturers will enable it by default instead valuing your data consistency.

ummm..

[brizok]

i remember seeing a site on Toms Hardware.. discussing and benchmarking different hard drive setups for games (performance wise). The fastest setup was a good ol' single hard drive, not the raid. So I guess this wont help gaming.... or battery life, or the weight of the laptop.. btw, Desktops will always be around.

Two harddrives? Two everythings!

[David Rolfe]

I think the fact is you have just made a compelling argument to travel for business with two laptops. If you are using raid ONLY for redundancy, then you have to ask, what about the screen, battery, motherboard, and umpteen other components that could fail -- and stop all work -- while traveling.

I think a better solution -- although more expensive, surely -- would be to stow an extra laptop in your baggage, configured similarly/ identically. Store your unique data on both the internal drive and a removable drive (usb flash, cdrw). Then, without the loss of battery life (and thus portability) you've saved yourself from all manner of fatal failures. Since you are on the company's dime, why not spring for another $2000 for a spare laptop. If the drive goes bad in one (or the battery, display, keyboard, etc), chuck it in the overhead, pull out the other, and resume work with a fresh charge.

Now you don't have to worry about finding any repair shops, you just have to find the nearest fed-ex. You ship your failed system to your IT people, they send it (or a replacement) back, and now you're prepared for the trip home with the same level of redundancy.

Here's two failover scenarios:

1. One laptop with two hardrives, raid: 2 hours of battery. But atleast harddrive failure won't interrupt the 2 hours you've got.

2. Two laptops with one harddrive each: 4 x 2 hours of battery. Any single failure will leave you with at least 4 hours of work.

In the best case of a drive failure near the end of battery life, you will "enjoy" nearly 8 hours of work compared to at most 2-3 hours (for the huge laptop with two harddrives).

To me, raid in a laptop seems like a waste. Single drive failure is such a small factor compared to set of productivity threats faced by a laptop (in the server room there's about zero chance of droppage, theft, spillage, battery failure, forgotten AC cords, closing the display with a pen on the keyboard, among others). I think you'd be better off with two inexpensive laptops (e.g., two stock iBooks = $2000) than one 'big' laptop with a single redundant drive. Leave raid for scenarios where it's really beneficial, 4 drives or more, striping+mirroring, n-1 crc recovery, etc.

Finally, using raid JUST for redundancy and not for recovery/integrity (like in our pretend laptop, 2-disk raid-1) is retarded; I mean where's the high-availabilty in a laptop without hot-plug?! All that wasted overhead for what? I guess it's only a matter of time for laptops to have at least 3 harddrives, at which point other [useful] raid levels [3 and 5] finally open up.

Anyway, I've rambled long enough. Cheers. (Pardon any typos)