RAID help for a newbie please!

[brammers]

Hi all,

I've got myself a pair of identical drives to use as an OS RAID 0 array. Unfortunately I'm not having much luck setting it up, and I can't find tutorials either - they all seem to be for XP...

I've put the drives in SATA slots 0 and 1. I've set them to be RAID/Striped in the RAID utility that comes up in POST sequence. I then went to install Win 7 64bit, which went well, but upon booting into the desktop for the first time I had one 900gb drive instead of one 500gb drive - the RAID was spanned instead of striped.

I'm guessing I need to install some drivers somewhere along the line. My mobo is an Asus M4N78 - can anyone hold my hand from this step? I've blanked the machine and I'm back at reinstalling windows.

Cheers all!

[brammers]

Quick update - I'm at the stage in Windows where it comes to choosing where to install. I've got Disk 0 Unallocated space - 931.5GB. Again - this is a spanned rather than a striped RAID drive. I've tried to install all of the RAID drivers on my mobo CD but they're not doing anything... Any ideas?

[Terbinator]

When you set the striping up during your RAID utility and it asks for striping-size did it not ask for what RAID/disk size you wanted as well ? When I set mine up it offered the above options, however this was using the Intel Matrix offering with a P55.

Just make sure you check all available fields - hope this helps!

[alsenior]

you need to grab the nvidia sataraid drivers from either the asus site or the nvidia site

Asus site

http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID...Lmv&templete=2

nvidia site

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nforc..._15.49_uk.html

it should state how to do the raid setup in you manual. i would follow that as everyh implementation appears to be different

[brammers]

I've got the drivers - windows doesn't really do anything when I tell it to install them - neither confirms or denies that they've been installed.

The manual is no use - it's written for XP. Works the same up to Win install, then it's no help.

When I boot Windows for the first time, should the Stripe already be configured? E.g. should it display 500 gb? Or do I just set the drives to work in RAID before Win, so it boots into Win with 900GB the first time, then configure the RAID then?

[brammers]

Got it - it's me being dumb - I was under the impression that RAID 0 halved your diskspace... Oops.

Having another issue now - will ask more Qs if I can't sort that out

[Will404]

, good you got it sorted. As I expect you have found out;

RAID 0 (or a striped array), is where half of the data is stored on each of 2 (or more) disks. This means that accessing the data should in theory be upto twice as fast - say the max transfer speed of data from each disk is ~100mb/s (theoretical figures), then the max throughput for two would be double ~200mb/s, attaining half the information from each disk.

Remember that this also doubles the chance of any failure, and in a case of disk failure if one fails you loose all the data. So backup is now even more essential than before:O - you would not wanna loose everything now youve got it all sorted out would you

[brammers]

Nope - not got it unfortunately.

I think I had it once - I booted into Windows and reformatted in disgust at my 950GB partition Since then I've been having problems. Here's the setup:

Seagate 150GB drive with Win7 installed on
Seagate 1tb drive with data on it
Seagate E-sata 1tb drive with backup of data
2x Samsung 500GB drives which I want to RAID 0 and run the OS on.

Everything works fine with the drives in SATA mode. I can boot off the small Seagate, see all the other drives and everything works.

The RAID util works fine too - I can create a RAID array, it finds all my disks, I tell it to Stripe the 2x Samsungs, set it to be bootable - no problems.

Then I have problems. If I try to boot windows in RAID mode, using the same installation of Windows as before the machine restarts before the win loading screen comes on.

If I try to install windows on the RAID array then I get a 'windows cannot create a boot partition or find a boot partition on this drive' error. I get this error for all of the drives, Windows won't install on any of them. I can format the RAID array, delete partitions, recreate them etc and I guess I could on the other drives if I wanted to, but I can't install on any of them.

Put it back into SATA mode and everything's fine.

BIOS is the latest version, anyone got any ideas what's going on? I'm off to bed now but would really appreciate some input

[Terbinator]

The only suggestion ive got is make sure you have SATA devices set to RAID in the BIOS- maybe its switching back to IDE/ACHI after you've created the array ? Also take all the other disk drives out expect the Samsungs.

[peterb]

You might want to read this article

http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Stora...-Your-Home-PC/

before wasting more time pursuing the largely mythical notion that 'RAID 0 = faster speeds'. It can. under certain circumstances - in others it can be slower - especially read operations.

[pardal51]

Folks,

It is always helpful to do your RAID calculations using one of the free tools on the net:

http://raidcalculator.icc-usa.com/

http://www.grijpink.eu/tools/raid/

I have given up the idea of RAID on home machines. Can't see any speed gains when stripping.

Good luck

[brammers]

Thanks for the article peterb. I'm pretty happy that my usage falls squarely under one of the situations they say it'll speed things up. If it doesn't seem that great, I can always pull it apart - installing an OS is (usually) a 2 hour job nowdays. Backups aren't an issue.

Managed to get it running and I did it by... I dunno. I swapped between SATA, RAID and AHDI mode a few times, rebuilt the RAID a few times, restarted a few times... and something made it work. Gonna put it down to one of those things.

[Terbinator]

2 hours ??? Win7 took 15mins from Bios > IE (to downlaod FF obviously )

[brammers]

I mean 2 hours to things being exactly how it was before - all the programs, all the add-ons, all the files in the right place. I haven't timed it, but the point is it doesn't take long so it's something I'm happy to do.

Having said that, I've never had a HDD fail on me, so hopefully I won't need to. It's up and running atm things are a lot faster than before, but whether this is down to F3s being a lot faster than a Seagate 7200.9, to the reformat or due to the RAID I dunno. No adverse effects though, so it can stay