can anyone help get good hard disk setup?

jasperok

currently have 2 wd raptors and a fist of sata drives.
have os on one raptor ,have progs on another, and swapfie on the best of the standard sata drives artioned at the beginning of the disk.

i am tempted to run raid and maybe improvre things a bit. was thinking of getting a pair of those new 3 plater drives with NCQ from komplett. think its 200 euros a pair.

can anyone suggest a good configuration or any pointer on optimising th hard drive setup would be greatly appreciated as i know little about it and hae never used raid.

thanks

L31mr0d

Ok well, are the 2 raptors the same size?

If so:

Set them up in a RAID 0, set up your OS and settings then ghost it to a backup drive. Whatever files you are storing on your RAID have them backep up on a second drive (you should be doing this regardless of the RAID 0) have a good defragmentation routine in place, to defragment the paging file, MFT and general storage. If using Vista you shouldn't have to concern yourself with getting a 3rd party defrag as the one included is fairly good, its basically a stripped down version of Diskeeper. If using XP i'd recommend using Diskeeper, or the free alternative is O&O

SwampThing

Something else to try - I was tempted to try this myself but eh, just didn't.
If you have a 'fist' of same sized SATA disks (by 'fist' I mean 4 or more) you could try RAID 10 or if your controller supports it, RAID 6 - redundancy and performance all rolled into one neat package!

Otherwise, as L32mr0d said, I'd put the two Raptors in RAID 0 for the OS and the rest for data - choose the RAID level based on how painful losing the data would be.

Just remember, your RAID controller is the key component here. You're not going to see blistering performance from any RAID setup if the controller is crap.

Khannie

two raptors in raid 0 (or striped read style raid 1). SATA drives in raid 5. I have this setup at the moment and it's fast. The raid 5 is lovely. 150MB/s consistent read speeds + redundancy.

I am using software raid (on linux, but performance with a controller on windows should be similar). I should add that I have a quad core, so the compute overhead for the software raid is of no concern to me. It might be a concern with a dual core, and definitely would be with a single core.

Anti

sell all your drives and invest in ssd's.

jasperok

thanks for the ideas?

so you think the raptors in raid0 for OS
then raid 5 for program files, would you have to set up raid 5 after OS install ?
curios to how 3 drives on software raid5 would erform betterthan 4 drives on hardware 0 and 1?

or have i missed the idea of raid?

Khannie

jasperok wrote: »

curios to how 3 drives on software raid5 would erform betterthan 4 drives on hardware 0 and 1?

or have i missed the idea of raid?

raid 10 > raid 5 for speed, but raid 5 > raid 10 for space.

e.g. 4 x 500G hard drives in raid 10 = 1.0TB
4 x 500G in raid 5 = 1.5TB