Slashdot Mirror
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? "
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.
Nothing beats proper backup and/or syncing tools and procedure.
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.
...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.
Sounds great, but what about battery life? That hing would eat a 6 or 8 cell Li-ion battery for breakfast. Why would a businessman want a laptop that is heavy (2 HDs and bigger battery) low battery life and bulky? Sounds good in theory, but doesnt work - like communism. In summary - that is the laptop for communists.
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".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Because people don't backup on the network once a night and you go to a normal person and you ask them to do that they will stare at you with a blank face. Then if you show them how to do it the face will become more blank.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
What if you're traveling? If you do it a lot, it's likely one of your drives will fail.. But you have an up-to-the-second backup with you at all times.
Not everyone will need/want it. Personally I'd keep mine in a RAID-0 config because laptop drives are low RPM.
Latewire
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..
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.
I saw in some of the postings that people DID NOT like the idea of laptop raid. Well, I'm wondering WHY NOT? Any customer who is likely to care about RAID probably isn't the most mobile user (hence not caring quite as much about batterly life). But, I'm afraid of doing certain things on my laptop for fear of it crapping out or worse, getting stolen. For me DATA redundancy is a MUST.
Additionally, Intel's new chips are supposedly VERY power efficient. If they can make future laptops with RAID sans the power problems... great.
But the real issue is probably COST. If you don't know what RAID is you aren't going to buy it....and its not going to increase cost THAT MUCH. But for those of us who DO know what raid is and either want increased performance or reliability.... there is a market! I don't really like having limited options when I'm making a choice, so having the OPTION of RAID is exactly what I WANTED. --Matt Wong
I have a laptop with RAID right now. Sager has a model or two with Promise Raid support. I don't use it since the second harddrive failed, but I was using it before that in a striped RAID config - it did boost performance a bit.
IO on laptops is still one of the worst problems about using a laptop. What good is a 2+ ghz cpu when you have to wait for IO all the time. And with newer laptops having 2 HD's, might as well raid em.
Sure lots of "dont need it" posts today, only downside is battery life.
Screw games, work on some server logs and try to do some statstics, give me faster HD access now. (I upgraded my 5200 to a 7200 HD, night and day difference.)
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.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
The title really should be HARDWARE RAID. Software RAID has always been possible on laptops.
Some folks will do it for speed. RAID0. Laptop drives are usually pretty slow, and usually what makes a laptop significantly slower than an desktop with an equivalent CPU speed (I buy 7200 RPM ones for my laptops myself, but 5400 is more common). RAID0 can add some needed speed. If your just doing word processing/email, that speed isn't needed, but some folks do serious computations on their laptops, others have their laptop do dual duty as their game rig. Not everyone is going to use their computer like you do.
Others will do it for the extra reliability. Nightly backups might be good enough for you, but as I said, not everyone uses their laptops for the sort of work you do.
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).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Because Murphy's Law predicts that things will always go wrong at the worst possible time.
If you have backups and keep them at the home/office then you will be screwed if you are away at a conference and your hard disk drive fails on the night before you have to make a Powerpoint presentation.
Having a RAID Level 1 architecture, gives you the chance to have two hard-disk drives with identical copies of the same information. At least if one fails, you still have the other.
Although, I would hope that both hard disk drives are kept away from each other within the laptop, as if one overheated, it could very well fry the other one.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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:
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
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Forgive my ignorance, but why on earth would anyone want RAID on their laptop?
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.
More
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.
Because people want convenience (read: are lazy) and want to just turn on and off and never worry about until smoke comes out, but a tech (with a big S on his blue Spandex) says, "Nothing to worry about! Thanks to RAID!"
The extra drive will just make your battery last a little less longer, so you can turn your snarling, foaming visage to purchasing and rant about how you need a $*&@#! laptop with a bigger battery.
"phenominal cosmic power, itty-bitty battery"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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?
- 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...
- 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.Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You were thinking about it huh? A couple of days ago you say? It's a good thing i got to the patent office first then... MUAHAHAHA!
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.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
At the university I work some of the more overhyped IT courses lend laptops to their students. Of the about 1000 laptops in circulation there are maby 3-4 dead HDs a year, and it's all due to generous amounts of gravity. :D
/greger
It's impossible to have a single set of standards since laptops have many specialized purposes. However, the better models have standardized on upgradable video card formats (MXM). I'm hoping to buy a Quanta laptop soon that has an upgradable Nvidia Geforce 6600 Go video card.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
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.
Another one bites the dust
NAPA and Pentium-M are not just for laptops: Intel is serious about putting them into 1U blade servers. In a server environment, it makes a lot of sense to have hardware RAID. Intel is also planning a new Xeon chip based on the 65nm Yonah core, codenamed Sossamn: http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=250 8&p=60 8&p=6
On a side note, the napa northbridge might soon be integrated into the pentium-m die, now they will have a fast cache and memory controller: http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=25
I'd rather have a wifi link and have my scsi hosted in a nice safe place. Make it 'mirror' over a wifi.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
You never know with those whacky physics students....
Seems like desktops are becoming smaller, quieter and more efficient while notebooks are becoming larger, noisier and hungrier. Whatever happened to portability?
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
RAID will not make your games *run* faster. Games are entirely CPU and graphic bound, and disk performance has no impact. RAID *will* shave off a 1-2 seconds off your map load times, maybe. http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=66&page =2
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.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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?
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.
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.
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
If you are willing to pay $50 per gigabyte of solid state mass storage, go right on ahead. I'll continue to pay 1% of that per gigabyte of mechanical storage until a truly competitive alternative emerges.
Keep in mind that the costs of fabbing 1GB of flash memory is going to be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of fabbing 1GB of RAM. This is because of the relative transistor and feature size complexities involved, so it is unrealistic to expect silicon-based solid state mass storage to be inexpensive unless there is a significant breakthrough that affects flash fabbing and not RAM fabbing, or some other, completely different tech becomes available.
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.
Best regards.
I didn't know they still made $1900 bills.
I'm still trying to figure out what is so special about including RAID in a laptop though. HP has been doing it with their upper model level laptops for at least a year now. One of my friends came back from the army with his, it had dual SATA 250s in it. Fast as all hell. Naturally battery life suffered tremendously. I think he'd be lucky to get an hour out of it.
The standardising of laptops has happened as much as it is going to happen.
Not because big brand computer retailers want to nececarily, but because they are all hiring the same company in Tiawan.
The video cards are MCM (or somthing like that)
They all have MiniPCI slots and the same antene hookups for WiFi
All the modems are that same funky little board with the dual surface mount plugs and anoyying little 2 pair socket.
Of course the memory and HDD have been standard for a long time (Even those seemingly proprietary (old)IBM, its a standardd drive in a metal casse with a pass through connector)
All the CD Drives, are one of 2 or 3 standaards with custom plastic on them, get a new one that matches, swap the plastic. Same woth floppy driveee (those lucky to have them internal these days. And most of them (both cdrom and floppy) are Mitsumi.
Its the real corporate duche bags that decide to use proprietary lockouts in the bios (Ive heard of HP and Dell, probably more) most notably on WiFi cards that ruin it for us.
On modern laptops, you can swap out most of the hardware there, some even have a socket for the CPU so you can upgrade it too (My old Sony VAIO).
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
Seriously, I'm curious. I consider myself a technically proficient person, and I use RAID myself both at work and at home, but I fail to see how a mirrored disk will make Doom 3 run faster.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21 01&p=10
RULE #1 If you want better performance buy a better drive, not more drives.
If you want data integrity a MUCH better alternative would be to simply use a 4GB flash drive, and hey, its available now, doesn't use all your battery, is silent, weighs nothing, and is more portable, adding another HD to a laptop is a bit stupid. Not a very good idea Intel...
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.
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!
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)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.