I have the wrong raid setup, i think

Dempsey

My current RAID 5 setup aint giving me the performance of my old 2 x 36Gb RAID 0 Raptors. Its as clear as day to me.

I'm inclined to go back to Raid 0 but the thoughs off loosing 500GB of information at any given time would be heart break for me. So with my current board does anyone know of a good setup to implement?

I dont want to reinstall everything again so could someone explain to how I can image my current setup on to another drive, change the raid to something else and reload the image. I dont know anything about doing this.

Thanks in advance

SouperComputer

what RAID controller are you using?

Also, RAID5 on 7200RPM drivers is not going to give the peformace of the raptors as the seek time is too high. Low seek times lead to less real-world bandwidth and throughput. So even if you think you can get mega transfer speeds, the reality is that the seek times are just too high to get the data there in time.

Dempsey

I'm using onboard raid, like the raptor setup. The weakness, i know. Where is a good online store to get proper raid cards, hard to find good ones?

So with the drives I have, you reckon I should RAID 0?

SouperComputer

Ebay is a good bet for a proper hardware RAID card. They aint cheap no matter what though. 3ware s a good brand.

Try RAID 0, but again with the 7200 RPM drives, your latency and therefore real-world throughput is most likely going to be lower than the raptors, despite the aural density of the Seagates.

Dempsey

Hmm, read alot of threads about raptors and how other newer drives were close to their performance and I read reviews stating the same but there really is a huge difference and I would have paid for it again, if I knew then what I know now.

matt-dublin

best performance on raid is raid 1+0 or raid 10,

raid 5 has good write speeds and bad read speads bu offers excellent redundancy.

Raid 10 mirroring is probably the faster with both good read and write speeds.

Biro

Raid 1+0 is quickest, but is a mirror drive, so halves your capacity. (only the capacity of one disk). Safe, quick, but costly on GB's!!

Dempsey

I have 1192 GB's in Total

RAID 1+0 would mean I'd only have 596Gb, thats an ouch but redundancy can make up for it.

I think i'll go for the RAID 1+0 setup.

My new problem is how will I backup everything? I have approx 43Gb of data.

I could image the data onto another hard drive, setup the raid 0, restore and then implement the RAID 1 backup.

I dunno anything about imaging and restore in this manner

matt-dublin

just copy the information to a new hard drive and then copy it back with the new configuration

Dempsey

This drive has the OS on it, does that cause complications?

matt-dublin

the raid drive has the os in it?

or the spare one?

Dempsey

Raid Drive has OS

matt-dublin

yeah you can't ghost or image as far as i know, google it to check but i don't think you can.

You'll probably best off atarting from scratch,

what are you storing? does it actually need that much redundancy?

blorg

You can ghost the OS drive onto a new drive no problem, I have done this many times when upgrading a hard drive. When done you just swap out the old drive and in the new and just boot up as normal.

Have used Maxtor's MaxBlast utility and also Partition Magic (copy partition.) Never did it with RAID but don't see why it would affect it if the computer is seeing it as a single logical drive.

Dempsey

matt-dublin wrote:

yeah you can't ghost or image as far as i know, google it to check but i don't think you can.

You'll probably best off atarting from scratch,

what are you storing? does it actually need that much redundancy?

Just stuff and I rather not loose it and when you are talking in terms of 500GB, loosing that can be a disaster even if its just films and crap

L31mr0d

'bout time to get an external HDD then... i've been in your position for yonks, having too much data too shift around, but mine is in the 100's of GBs. Spent a day burning it all to 4.7GB DVDs, after that demoralising experience I decided to get an external drive, not only is it good for backup, but offers a safe haven for data when doing a drive switch. Go for a RAID 10, the piece of mind of that redundancy and the added performance will be worth it.

Dempsey

Moving the data off the raid isnt an issue, I have a 320GB hdd that I can move everything to.

I dunno how to create an image on my current setup, and reload it on the new raid array. I fear complication is getting to the OS to boot and i'll have start from scratch

SouperComputer

Dempsey wrote:

Moving the data off the raid isnt an issue, I have a 320GB hdd that I can move everything to.

I dunno how to create an image on my current setup, and reload it on the new raid array. I fear complication is getting to the OS to boot and i'll have start from scratch

The problem is that it is soft RAID and really the array only exists in windows. Basically you may need to boot into a seperate install (say on a 10GB drive) and try to make an image from there.

After that though, restoring it is going to be fun. TBH, start from scratch its less hassle overall!