raid raptors n hard drives

[kinnth]

I already have a 500gb seagate hd but i have just upgraded to an evga 680i motherboard which supports raid.

Now i would love to use raid but i have never done it before so just wanted some questions answered.

I am concidering buying a 36gb raptor drive, prehaps 2 and running them as raid 1, to make sure i have no hard drive crashes.

My question is this, if my system is already installed on the 500gb drive but windows is configured for an asus p5ne sli motherboard, can i install the 2 raptors with the new motherboard, then leave my data on the larger 500gb hd and once windows is installed, plug it into the other sata port and grab my data off it. I also have a linux partition on the 500gb drive that i dont need any more I just want to delete it, could that inflict on any boot sequences or something?

I heard alot about needing to have raid drivers on a floppy if you want to do it on xp, however i dont have a floppy drive, will it be ok if i put the drivers on a cd or mem stick? or should my drivers be on the xp sp2 cd?

would people recommend having the 2 36gb raptors on raid 0 or 1 or 1+0 or 0+1? I want to get the most performance.

anything else i should know about before going ahead with this?

[arthurleung]

If you only have 2 36GB Raptors, you can either run RAID0 or RAID1, unless you are using Matrix RAID or Windows/Linux software RAID.

You will get better performance if you buy 2x500GB harddrive, use Matrix RAID with may be 80GB RAID0 in the first part of the disks, 160GB RAID1 in the middle of the disks, and 300GB non-RAIDed space.

The 80GB RAID0 in the 500GB drives will give substantially higher sequential transfer rate than the raptors. The latency difference will be quite small since the raptor will need to seek the whole disk while the 500GB disks will only need to seek 1/12 of the disk.

[Lucio]

Now i would love to use raid but i have never done it before so just wanted some questions answered.

My first question would be, why?? RAID technology is designed to help either a) improve the reliability of your storage or b) attempt to increase the speed at which databases can be accessed.

Do you plan on doing a lot database work on your PC?


If you're still dead set on installing RAID because you can, you're far better off simply getting another 500GB drive (or two!) and building a RAID 0 array from that (assuming your after that nigh on impossible to notice fraction of a second access speed improvement).

[this_is_gav]

The 80GB RAID0 in the 500GB drives will give substantially higher sequential transfer rate than the raptors. The latency difference will be quite small since the raptor will need to seek the whole disk while the 500GB disks will only need to seek 1/12 of the disk.

Sequential data rates are pointless for an OS. There is simply no use. A single Raptor, even one of the early 36gb ones, is much better than a modern 500gb drive for an OS, no matter how you partition it. It's all about access times for an OS drive, and the Raptor's is half that of even the best 7,200rpm ones.

For this reason, RAID0ing an OS drive doesn't hold any noticeable benefit, no matter whether you use Raptors or a more standard drive. The sequential speeds don't give any benefit in all but rare instances. I agree with Lucio, though not his last comment. 1tb of RAID0? You might as well plan the suicide run now. 1tb in RAID0+1 or RAID5 or something would be fine though.

[kinnth]

ok so from what I can gather,

I should buy 1 raptor drive and another 500gb drive. Use the raptor purely for xp and store data on the other 500gb drives.

This is a home pc, where i backup all music and dvd's i buy, so alot of the 500gb of data is mp3 or avi / vob files. If I want to keep backups of this data / secure it, would it be best to use backup software like ghost or acronis or would it be worth using raid 1?

I do not have space for a separate raid controller, so the raid would be controlled by xp.

[moogle]

yes with windows xp you really do need a floppy, it just says insert floppy disk with raid drivers. no option to browse etc.

[Lourdes]

You don't need a floppy, just slipstream the drivers with nLite.

[kinnth]

how do u do that lourdes as i dont have a floppy drive?

[peterb]

ok so from what I can gather,

I should buy 1 raptor drive and another 500gb drive. Use the raptor purely for xp and store data on the other 500gb drives.

This is a home pc, where i backup all music and dvd's i buy, so alot of the 500gb of data is mp3 or avi / vob files. If I want to keep backups of this data / secure it, would it be best to use backup software like ghost or acronis or would it be worth using raid 1?

I do not have space for a separate raid controller, so the raid would be controlled by xp.

RAID 1 is really all about resilience, fault tolerance and minimising downtime - not about backing up data. If you are concerned about backup, you would be better off putting the second 500 GB drive in an external housing and just backing up the main system drive (or te data folders) to that every week or so - and then leaving it on the shelf. If you are concerned about reloading the OS and losing all the settings, then yes, clone the disk, then (in theory) if the system disk fails you should be able to swap the failed drive for the one in the caddy and the system should be up an running.

Personally I think the best way to clone the disk would be with a linux live CD - then the windows OS is completely dead and all the OS files are static and closed so you get a true logical image. (It is also free!)

The command from a terminal window is dd if=/dev/source_drive of=/dev/destination_drive

but you need to know how the drives are labelled in Linux (for IDE drives, the first drive on the primary channel is usually hda, the slave drive on the first channel is usually hdb, the master on the second channel is hdc, the slave on the second channel is hdd. SATA drives may be labelled hd or sd - but it is easy to tell from the live CD. USB drives are usually sdsomething

So if your system disk is a primary IDE device and the USB caddy is plugged in, the command would be

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda