Want to upgrade RAID - advice pls

jrd

Bought a Dell 9150 two years ago. Chose to put 160GB 7200RPM RAID 1 MIRROR SATA HDD in the PC, after a couple of HDD failures over the years. But now 160GB is not enough to store music/photos and want to move to 500GB.

Checked out komplett.ie and saw 2 x Samsung Spinpoints for €140. See http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=338938

Will these work for me? Are they any good? Any other recommendations on "best" HDDs to use? Any advice on changing RAID disks in general or is it straight forward?

TIA

SwampThing

jolly, I'll let other more qualified people guide you on which is the 'best' hdd for your machine. I could be wrong, but that Dell has a sata I controller and the drives are sata II? If so, the drives will work, but not at their full potential. You could probably get a cheap sata II raid controller (in fact, I got one FOC with each of the two 500GB disks I bought - see sig).

What I can advise is this - you'll need to get a Ghost or Acronis or some other partition level image of your current setup in order to change both drives in the raid set. Essentially, you'll backup the partition(s), replace the drives with new ones, re-create the raid set(s) and restores the partition(s).

jrd

SwampThing wrote: »

jolly, I'll let other more qualified people guide you on which is the 'best' hdd for your machine. I could be wrong, but that Dell has a sata I controller and the drives are sata II? If so, the drives will work, but not at their full potential. You could probably get a cheap sata II raid controller (in fact, I got one FOC with each of the two 500GB disks I bought - see sig).

What I can advise is this - you'll need to get a Ghost or Acronis or some other partition level image of your current setup in order to change both drives in the raid set. Essentially, you'll backup the partition(s), replace the drives with new ones, re-create the raid set(s) and restores the partition(s).

SwampThing - thanks. Is there a noticeable difference between SATA I and SATA II? Can I ask where you got the 500GB disks? In terms of changing both drives, am I interpreting you correctly by saying backup to external or other source, put the image on the new drives beforehand and change both at the same time? Ta.

SwampThing

Jolly, I got the drives from Dabs, it's a good while ago!

Theoretically, sata II is twice as fast as sata I (300Mb/s vs 150Mb/s) so it can make a difference, provided there isn't any other bottlenecks in your system - slow main board etc etc.

You need to backup the images to an external source and verify the image is sound. Personally, I'd approach this like this:

1. Backup your partitions (C: - whatever partitions you have on the raidset) Make sure you backup the partitions, not the disk - it's cleaner.

2. Verify the image!

3. Remove the existing disks - don't wipe them and know which was connected where, in case you have to go back to them.

4. Install the new disks, create the raidset and set in bios as bootable, if needed.

5. Restore each partition to the new raidset.

If it all goes well, you now have two 160GB disks to do with what you please. If you have spare sata ports available, I'd consider configuring these in RAID 0 for performance and using them for your swap file, installing games etc. (put nothing you can't afford to lose or haven't a backup of on this raidset). Also a good place to keep an image of the OS disk on, in case of emergencies!

Or, configure them in raid 1 and use it for all your documents, music, photos etc. whatever you want.

Personally, I use Acronis for cloning the drives - I find it works better with odd controllers and raidsets, something Ghost can sometimes be a bit iffy with.

Hope this helps.

nibble

The best option IMO for speed/capacity/redundancy would be a RAID 5 array with 4 disks, that way you get smallest disk times 3 in capacity and the speed of RAID 0. Granted that would mean buying 4 disks of equal capacity which you might not want to spend the money for, but it would be optimal IF you can do it, what OS are you using? Windows ultimate and business and almost all server editions support it and of course linux does too . Of course if you have a card it's not an issue..

SwampThing

nibble, raid 5 will never give you the same performance as raid 0, not for a desktop users setup anyway. 4 disks in raid 5 versus 2 or 3 in raid 0 - no contest.

Shiny

SwampThing wrote: »

nibble, raid 5 will never give you the same performance as raid 0, not for a desktop users setup anyway. 4 disks in raid 5 versus 2 or 3 in raid 0 - no contest.

Exactly and thats if he has a 300€ raid card with onboard parity processor.

I would back up all the photos somewhere first before doing any of this.

nibble

SwampThing wrote: »

nibble, raid 5 will never give you the same performance as raid 0, not for a desktop users setup anyway. 4 disks in raid 5 versus 2 or 3 in raid 0 - no contest.

Well true enough but the performance shouldn't be that much lower, not enough to negate the benefit of redundancy that it brings. Would read speed really be that much slower on a modern system, just from skipping parity blocks - after all that's the only difference to raid0?