setting up a raid

awhir

ok i got a 32gb raptor and wana get rid of (silent pc).also got 2 seagates both 300gb 1 is the 7200.9 model and the other is the 7200.10 model will these work in a raid ??

im backing up all my info now , AND am going to do a reinstall of windows.just wonder how should i set these ,like how many partitions.i will be using it for storage,games and windows.

is it easy to set up a raid 0 or whats the story ??

quaidox

you will need to buy a raid controller before you can set up a raid array...

Odaise Gaelach

Setting up a RAID array is pretty easy (provided you've got the controller ). As long as you plan everything ahead then you should be okay.

There are a couple of pitfalls with regards to RAID:

1) You'll need a driver disk for when you install Windows. Setup won't recognise your new RAID drive, so you'll have to give it the drivers during setup.

2) Linux is not very RAID compatible. Most likely, you won't be able to install it without a lot of legwork - if at all.

3) RAID0 arrays require both hard drives to work in order to function properly. Basically, if one drive dies you completely lose all the data from both drives, no matter how healthy your other drive is.

4) When you create or change the RAID array, it will wipe all data from your two hard drives.

Well, that's all that I can think of. Anyone else want to add anything?

Oh, by the way... I think that a 32K striping block is a good size.

awhir

my board has a in build uli raid controller built in i think.

so how do i go about setting 1 up ??

quaidox

yeah if you are gonna go and set up a raid arrray for redundancy reasons you should set up at least a raid 1 array. unless of course you want a raid 0 array specifically for getting improved read/write speed from your drives.

awhir

found this i wana go raid 0

Think of it this way:

* RAID 0 - Allows for 2 hard drives to work as a single hard drive thus allowing you to make it be used as a single drive. The advantage of this is also mainly due to speed, the speed of a RAID 0 is immense, we're talking 5-10x faster depending on the FSB on the mobo and cables connecting to the HDDs. You do not need identical drives for this.
* RAID 1 - This is where you do need identical drives, what RAID 1 does is allow for one HDD to be used where the other HDD is invisible to the system, it's completely no touching territory, the reason for this is that if one of your HDDs decides to fail, then you have an exact copy on the other one, this setup is built solely for safety reasons if you have VERY important documents. So if you change a file on the main HDD, the same happens on the backup, it's wonderful stuff but a touch slower than having a single HDD because of the extra bandwidth needed to replicate on the other HDD.

Personally I always go for RAID 0, almost everyone goes for RAID 0 because all the stuff they have can easily be replaceable, but in terms of servers and businesses then a RAID 1 is a real must. Now if you have the money and the space in the case then I'd go for a RAID 10 setup, this means that you'll have a RAID 1 setup with a RAID 0 configuration for each mirror, so you get the performance boosts of RAID 0 as well as the protection of a RAID 1 setup.

quaidox

if you already have an onboard raid controller then all you should have to do is to connect the two drives to the controller, then when you are booting the machine you have to go into the raid controller bios when prompted. from there you should be able to create the drive array from the menu options...
this will reformat the two drives, so you will have to reinstall the os after this. during the text mode part of set up you will have to press f6 when prompted to install the raid controller drivers. after that, it's just the standard setup for windows.

awhir

cool and are there any recommended setting or is it all straigh forward ?

SouperComputer

2) Linux is not very RAID compatible. Most likely, you won't be able to install it without a lot of legwork - if at al

Linux does not work well with "fakeRAID" or "softRAID" which come bundled on many motherboards. This is not to be confused with a proper RAID array.

Consult you mobo manual for instructions on how to setup your array. Generally you go into BIOS, specify the drives you want in the array, the block size (leave it at default) and the type of RAID you want. You are proabbly already familiar with the F6 or slipstream proceedure for your controller drivers so I wont bother going through that.

Just be forwarned that the peformance gain somtimes found from RAID 0 comes at a cost. Even a bad shutdown or powercut etc that can corrupt the FS will assuredly break the array and make data recovery difficult.

Long story short, BACKUP!

awhir

hmm would i notice much performence if i just left the hdds at defult no raid ??

mukki

i have used raid0 since i went over 2ghz, your hard drive will be the bottler neck in any constant "reading-> converting-> writing process " like editing or converting movies, unless you raid it



but you have to be the sort of person who wouldn't get upset if your your c drive was gone in the morning

I had to re-build 3 times for no reason, ie it was not a hardware problem

awhir

OK covinced will set up a raid 0 soon .tnx for the help

mukki

an other thing you can do to speed up a pc at the risk of reliability is disable the system restore service

matdabomb

ok done 1 and done a 64k stripe size will this be ok or should i reinstall.

matdabomb

sorry wrong account this is awhir

awhir

so is 64k allright??

Anti

yip.

Personally i wouldnt bother with raid again, unless its a raptor or cheetah raid. You really wont notice the difference apart from loading times of games and such.

Richard Dower

RAID 0 is easy to setup and most RAID controllers have very simple bios ROMs. For RAID 0 you'll need two or more drives of identical size, make, model, firmware and manufacturer.

Stripe size is normally 128K or 64K depending on the controller, ICH8R is 128K while nVidia is 64K.

As someone said if for any reason the array fails you'll lose all data, so it's wise to backup regulary.

Richard Dower

awhir wrote:

so is 64k allright??

Test it, usually a smaller stripe size gains higher performance, in terms of raw numbers. But a smaller stripe size has less fault tolerance.