Raid setup?

[PodgePapin]

I have a Asus P5K Prem\WiFi and just wondered if it was worth setting up my two hdd's in raid and which is best way to do it?

[mightymouse]

depends on the type of hdds you have and also whether they are the same spec. you will have to list them.

if its the ones in your sig then i would bother

[Will404]

depends on the type of hdds you have and also whether they are the same spec. you will have to list them.

if its the ones in your sig then i would bother

From his sig I am guessing he has one 500gb spinpoint, and one 320gb one.

As not the same size, then you will loose some of the size form the larger one

[Hyperviper34]

Raid 0 (Data Striping) – Optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. The two HDD perform the same work as a single HDD but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single HDD, so improving data access ans storage. The use of two identical HDD is required for this setup.

Raid 1 (Data Mirror) – Copies and maintains an identical image of data form one drive to the second. If one fails, the disk array software directs all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of data. This Raid configuration provides data protection and increase fault tolerance to the entire system.
Use existing drive and a second drive of the same size or larger.

Raid 10 – Best of both worlds in data striping and mirroring combined without parity (redundancy dat) having to be calculated and written. You get all the above benefits, use four HDD or your existing one and three others of the same size or larger.

Raid 5 – Strips both data and parity information across three or more HDD, advantages of Raid 5 include better HDD performance, fault tolerance and higher storage capacity. The Raid 5 configuration is best suited for the transaction processing, database applications, enterprise resource planning and other business systems. Use a minimum of three identical HDD’s for this setup.

All the above can be setup from the P5K BIOS and using the MB manual section 5.4 and 5.5

[Sputnik]

Raid 0 (Data Striping) – Optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. The two HDD perform the same work as a single HDD but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single HDD, so improving data access ans storage. The use of two identical HDD is required for this setup.

I've never seen anyone manage to get double the transfer rate of drives they are using, 1.5x the speed of a single drive is closer to the truth.

[lodore]

Since you will be using motherboard raid controller dont bother.
its only worth doing if you buy a proper hardware raid controller which cost roughly £300

[PodgePapin]

ok thx for advice ppl

[sjbuck]

Since you will be using motherboard raid controller dont bother.
its only worth doing if you buy a proper hardware raid controller which cost roughly £300

I'd disagree with this, I see a massive improvement using RAID0 using onboard RAID (x38, ICH9), this is with both standard 400GB drives and raided SSD's. I'm talking 80MB/s going up to 150MB/s........just my 2p

[Splash]

I'd disagree with this, I see a massive improvement using RAID0 using onboard RAID (x38, ICH9), this is with both standard 400GB drives and raided SSD's. I'm talking 80MB/s going up to 150MB/s........just my 2p

I'd love to see some benchmarks for that, including the CPU hit...

Back to the OP anyhoo - the simple answer is that unless you have a reason to want to setup an array (and bear in mind that you'd need to understand the risks and tradeoffs involved) then I wouldn't recommend it. If you just want to do it because that's what geeks do I would definitely advise against it.

[alsenior]

I've never seen anyone manage to get double the transfer rate of drives they are using, 1.5x the speed of a single drive is closer to the truth.

The 2x figure is theoretical maximum and is very rarely if ever achieved so your right the most i have ever seen is from a software setup and it was about 1.75x as fast but we were throwing alot of cpu power at it.

Since you will be using motherboard raid controller dont bother.
its only worth doing if you buy a proper hardware raid controller which cost roughly £300

You can use the on-board disk controller and it will work very well. infact i use a onboard nvidia controller on my file server and it works without a glitch. also you can pick up cards like a dell perc5/1 for around £100 quid from the us and these work extremely well for the price

Raid 0 (Data Striping) – Optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. The two HDD perform the same work as a single HDD but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single HDD, so improving data access ans storage. The use of two identical HDD is required for this setup.

Raid 1 (Data Mirror) – Copies and maintains an identical image of data form one drive to the second. If one fails, the disk array software directs all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of data. This Raid configuration provides data protection and increase fault tolerance to the entire system.
Use existing drive and a second drive of the same size or larger.

Raid 10 – Best of both worlds in data striping and mirroring combined without parity (redundancy dat) having to be calculated and written. You get all the above benefits, use four HDD or your existing one and three others of the same size or larger.

Raid 5 – Strips both data and parity information across three or more HDD, advantages of Raid 5 include better HDD performance, fault tolerance and higher storage capacity. The Raid 5 configuration is best suited for the transaction processing, database applications, enterprise resource planning and other business systems. Use a minimum of three identical HDD’s for this setup.

All the above can be setup from the P5K BIOS and using the MB manual section 5.4 and 5.5

the drives dont havfe to be identical they just have to be 'alike' i.e: all 7200 rpm and roughly the same size otherwise things go pear shaped quickly.

I'd love to see some benchmarks for that, including the CPU hit...

Back to the OP anyhoo - the simple answer is that unless you have a reason to want to setup an array (and bear in mind that you'd need to understand the risks and tradeoffs involved) then I wouldn't recommend it. If you just want to do it because that's what geeks do I would definitely advise against it.

true that he's probably looking at at least ~15% usage on a q6600.

Trade off's (Raid 0)

• Higher Potential for failure (~180% if drives are same batch)(bad)
• more expensive(bad)
• Faster(good)
• Higher power usage(negligible)

[arthurleung]

I'd disagree with this, I see a massive improvement using RAID0 using onboard RAID (x38, ICH9), this is with both standard 400GB drives and raided SSD's. I'm talking 80MB/s going up to 150MB/s........just my 2p

Real-life difference between 100MB/s and 150MB/s is really minimal as no programs actually read data this way.

Program that need to process large amount of data sequentially, will unlikely to see harddrive usage more than 100MB/s (Even a simple MD5 verification peaks at 20-40MB/s with single core CPU). And there are plenty other ways to mitigate high disk speed requirement like applying lossless compression)

For a game that probably reads 100MB of texture, 150MB/s over 100MB/s wouldn't really save you much time, and games nowdays read the data in background, and doesn't need to read constantly at that speed.

If you are seeing massive improvement, may be because you reinstalled your OS or some other change in settings / drivers / cpu freq / amount of ram.

[Mr JB]

Main thing is always use a matching pair of drives and the whole raid would slow down to the slowest drive and you would have the capacity of the smallest drive.

The raid type you use is dependant on what you wanna do as stated above but have always had good experience of M/B raid but if you are using it in a server environment then you will need a proper raid controller for the large requests.

[arthurleung]

Main thing is always use a matching pair of drives and the whole raid would slow down to the slowest drive and you would have the capacity of the smallest drive.

The raid type you use is dependant on what you wanna do as stated above but have always had good experience of M/B raid but if you are using it in a server environment then you will need a proper raid controller for the large requests.

Personally would recommend avoid motherboard RAID, as if the motherboard breaks, your data COULD go with it. Unstable overclock could also corrupt data.

Hardware RAID controller's main advantage is it run INDEPENDENTLY from the motherboard/cpu/ram. Most vendors' card are backward compatible so your data is well protected even if something went terribly wrong in your hardware. There will be advantage for large requests/transfer rate but mainly for RAID5,6 NOT RAID0, and a lesser extent RAID1.