installing XP on RAID drives

Mr. Flibble

If it possible/easy to have 2 drives in RAID 0 configuration as your startup drive - using Windows XP?

Will I just be able to choose if I want to RAID the drives as I install XP or will I need any additional software? Is this a bad idea?


Cheers

DemonOfTheFall

You'll need a floppy disk with the drivers for the RAID array to give to windows while installing it. You push F6 at the start of installation when it asks you to then stick in the disk.

I'd say that RAID 0 isnt worth it. It just dicks around with your data and you lose the flexibility that having 2 seperate hard drives gives.

astrofool

"dicks around with your data"?

I wouldn't go back to non-raid tbh, having been using it since the kt7-raid series of boards (with 2 IBM 40g Deathstars ). Never had a RAID go bad on me yet (touches wood).

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah, raid has always screwed me over, and any friend who has used it. Eg booting the pc with a hard drive disconnected by accident and having to rebuild an array because of it.

Or in the case of a Dell PC, losing all your data if you turn the pc on with one of them unplugged.

In my experience it's not that much faster either. Faster for reading and writing yes, but not my that much. You get a lot faster transfers between 2 physical drives than you do between 2 partitions of a RAID 0 anyway, and I did that a lot more.

Mr. Flibble

Ok. It isn't sounding too good.

Is there a way of having two drives appear as one, but not have the data striped - so you can use each drive seperatly if you have to?

astrofool

so u're saying not to use RAID cos u're friends keep on disconnecting the drives?

Some people just should not use computers.

Capt'n Midnight

If the RAID 0 is done in hardware then yes.

If it's done in software then I would doubt it. Windows NT/2K/2003 all allow you to mirror your startup drive in software but only RAID subsequent partitions.

So you could put windows on one small partition so it stays at the start of the drive, install everything else on the RAID 0 if you have tons of backups.

RAID 0 to me is like Doublespace/Stacker back in days of DOS
95% of it's users think it's the greatest thing ever - the rest have lost all their data.

HDD's have a failure rate of say 3% per year and that rate is if anything worse than it used to be so RAID 0 means about 6% chance of loosing all data on both drives.

astrofool

tbh tho, if everyone should be backing up important data. I've never had a RAID go bad on me, but I do have a backup hard drive, just for backing up to, as well as having a good amount of the files distributed on the network.

unkel

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

RAID 0 to me is like Doublespace/Stacker back in days of DOS
95% of it's users think it's the greatest thing ever - the rest have lost all their data

LOL, the voice of experience and only too true...

I was one of the RAID0 followers a few years ago and I'm happy to share it makes feck all noticeable performance improvement on a PC

DemonOfTheFall

No, i'm saying that he *once* accidentaly booted the pc up, with the hard drive cable very slightly loose, and it cost him all of the data on both of the drives.

I was the 95% who thought that RAID was the best thing ever aswell, then I lost my painstakingly DivX'd backups of 3 seasons of family guy and 4 seasons of futurama. That took a long time to make. Afterwards RAID was not my friend.

Run RAID 0 if you have no important data and you feel a huge need to get a small speed increase, along with extra hassle installing windows.

If you just want the two hard drives to appear as one, use windows xp professional, you can create a dynamic volume where 2 hard drives appear as one.

_CreeD_

Raid0 does offer a considerable performance increase (With decent hardware), whether that increase is of benefit to you or not depends on your usage - since the increase is primarily in throughput if you deal with a lot of small files it'll be negligible as latency is the weakest link but loading larger files will be faster (and if that means about a 1/3rd of onslaught map loading time knocked off when UT2k4 is on my Raid volume vs. the single drives it's worth it). You may not like the system or have been in a position to appreciate it but don't claim it doesn't offer improvements at all.
As Mr.Fool mentioned (Ullo btw ) anyone who had little enough knowledge to disconnect Raid arrayed drives and/or (If accidental) to THEN rebuild an array instead of just powering down and reconnecting the drive shouldn't be using it. No offense but that's just anidiotic thing to do, not the technology's fault at all.
The same goes for backup concerns. Everyone regardless of Raid or not should maintain a responsible backup regime. Never use just Arrayed drives in a system as the additonal risks mentioned are quite true, just imho they shouldn't be showstoppers. Burn to DVD/keep sensitive data on a separate drive etc. Course thats no consolation when you do lose data but there are steps you can take (eg. though it's a pain and takes up more space I use Directory Duplicator to mirror my important data identical on 2 separate drives, I then backup to 2 DVD's.....:)....hey I'm careful....but it works). This is worth it for the performance gains on my main drive while I'm actually authoring material (Or being lazy and playing UT ).

DemonOfTheFall

Thanks for your words of wisdom Mr. Creed but I did try just turning off the PC straight away, plugging in the drive and powering it back on. My whole point about raid being retarded was the fact that IT DIDNT FIX IT. Intel's useless RAID controller (Dell 8400, i don't know what chipset/ any other details) wouldnt just let the array continue working, it insisted that it was broken and nothing i could do would fix it. So THAT is why I had to rebuild the array.

Next time you want to patronise someone try and get your facts straight, it makes you come off as an asshole.

SwampThing

Mr. Flibble wrote:

Ok. It isn't sounding too good.

Is there a way of having two drives appear as one, but not have the data striped - so you can use each drive seperatly if you have to?

Not too sure what you mean here.

If you had two drives appear as one, and you write a file to the drive, which physical disk does it get written to? That's a rhetorical question, btw.

"... two drives appear as one... " IS RAID - RAID-0 or RAID-1. I'll assume you know the difference and won't explain in any detail, except to say that RAID-1 gives you the option to use "..each drive separately if you have to.."

The only other way I see it is, you want to keep critical data on more than one disk. A simple directory mirroring utility will do that - Mirror Folder is one. You'll have two separate drives and no RAID.

Maybe you can explain a bit better what you're trying to do.

Capt'n Midnight

You want a fast boot drive ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/03/gigabyte_i-ram_ramdisk

Indeed, Gigabyte claimed storing Windows XP on the i-RAM rather than the hard drive would allow the OS to start up in one-thirteenth the time it takes to boot off a 7200rpm SATA hard drive.

_CreeD_

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

<snip>
Next time you want to patronise someone try and get your facts straight, it makes you come off as an asshole.

Take it anyway you like but I wasn't attempting to be patronising. As for getting facts straight before posting:

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

Yeah, raid has always screwed me over, and any friend who has used it. Eg booting the pc with a hard drive disconnected by accident and having to rebuild an array because of it.
...
Or in the case of a Dell PC, losing all your data if you turn the pc on with one of them unplugged.
...
No, i'm saying that he *once* accidentaly booted the pc up, with the hard drive cable very slightly loose, and it cost him all of the data on both of the drives.

My reply was an accurate summation of what you stated, if you had problems expressing yourself up til then that's your problem not mine (and if you can't see that re-read your own posts). My problem is that basically you stated the technology itself was at fault, not your components (Or your judgement, which was in question until you finally supplied the specific information you seem to think I just miraculously missed, but had never been posted in the first place).
Tell you what... I'll try to lay off being a patronising asshole if you try to lay off being an authoritative one on matters of opinion, and maybe not getting pissed at other posters because you didn't clarify a situation properly.
Saves us both some time...

astrofool

also, if the hard drive cable was slightly loose, then the computer may have tried to write corrupted data to it, which would indeed bugger the HD and the raid up. Even had it not been in RAID, it would still have been buggered in that situation.

(ullo CreeD, my bro tells me you're trying to emulate your tfc time in ut2k4 )