HDD setup

[bogart]

Have 2 160GB Sata drives set as raid 1. Been reading a lot regarding partions etc. Is suggested that first partion is about 5GB and used solely for operating system, nothing else. Would it be advantageous or not to put my operating system (win XP) on a separate 8.4GB disk I have hanging about on the IDE bus and use the 2 raid drives purely for files? Naturally backing up the operating system somewhere for a hopefully easy restore if ever needed

[Howard]

No.

The old 8.4gb drive will most likley be slow.

Just use your 160GB drives. They'll be nice and new and fast

[Spud1]

as howard said =) but i would run in RAID0 as its faster and no less reliable, i run 2x160gig drives in Sata raid0 cos raid1 jus wastes 80 quid=)

[Rythmic]

RAID0 as its faster and no less reliable

What are you smoking?

In a RAID 0 array, if a drive fails, you've lost the entire contents of your array. In a RAID 1, if a drive fails, you lose nothing.

[Howard]

Yes Rythmic is right, RAID 0 is the data striped alternatively across two discs and RAID 1 mirrors the data across two drives.

[Butuz]

Yes ignore Spud1 he needs to read up about Raid

Just have the whole lot as one partition. It dopesnt really make much differnece if your running Raid1 - and having one parition makes it easier to replace your hard disks if you ever want to swap your 2 x 160GB's for 2 x 250GB's or whatever. It's personal choice really, up to you.

Butuz

[directhex]

i like my raid 1 arrays. i don't fear that i'll lose my entire collection of chip & dale rescue rangers if a drive dies

[nakajima]

5GB just for the OS is quite big.

This is what i do. I allocate 6 GB just for Windows XP. 10GB for all other programs installed so they wont interfere with the OS partition. And a seperate 1.5GB for file paging which makes the system a lot faster!

The rest of the HDD space is then used to store data.

Also i think the perfomance gain from running Raid 1 is not worth it. If you're going to run raid, go for raid 0 for max performance...

[Butuz]

There is no performance gain in Raid 1. There is usually a performance loss with cheap Raid cards with no cache as everything needs to be written twice.

The only gain Raid 1 gives, is reliability. You use twice as much hard disk space as you should, and writing to disk is slower.

Butuz

[turkster]

I think you can get a bit of a boost in the read performance with RAID 1.

I'll just check it.

Yep here it is

RAID Level1 mirrors or duplexes the information of any drive by storing an identical copy on a secondary drive. The advantage is full redundancy and fault tolerance, however, there is no performance increase, at least not with respect to write speed. The situation is somewhat different when it comes to reads since data can be accessed in a “zipper-like fashion” from both drives, meaning that alternating blocks of information are transferred from each drive to the controller. This does result in a performance increase, especially in the case of sequential read transfers.

[Bindibadgi]

What's wrong with a RAID 0 and DVDR/separate backup drive? Touch wood i havent had a harddisk die in a long time, but its not just the disks - if a BIOS flash decides to screw up your array thatll do it too, ive had that before

Also - i know 2 drives is 2x as likely as 1, but if 1 goes and you arent RAID'ed then youve lost everything anyway?

I do see RAID1 as a waste of money sorry, maybe not so much for people with more mission critical needs.

[Spud1]

Yes ignore Spud1 he needs to read up about Raid

Just have the whole lot as one partition. It dopesnt really make much differnece if your running Raid1 - and having one parition makes it easier to replace your hard disks if you ever want to swap your 2 x 160GB's for 2 x 250GB's or whatever. It's personal choice really, up to you.

Butuz

ummm .. well...

using RAID1 loses you a HD - meaning your 120gig of space would cost you £160 insted of £80..

now unless you have bucketloads of cash most of us cant afford to do this. If i could afford that kind of monkey i'd probly just get RAID5 anyway...

RAID0 is only less reliable if a drive PHYSICALLY breaks, and this is fairly rare, only happened to me 4 times in the past 10 years. If the array fails but both drives are fine [can sometimes happen depending on the controller] you can just rebuild the array, no problems

Aslong as you backup your data as you would with a single big HD its no different to having one big 240gig HD - just faster

i aint the one needin to do some readin

[Butuz]

using RAID1 loses you a HD - meaning your 120gig of space would cost you £160 insted of £80..

Yes, well that is the price you have to pay for Redundancy and increased uptime unfortunatly. Just like you have to sacrifice reliability for the extra speed of Raid0.

now unless you have bucketloads of cash most of us cant afford to do this. If i could afford that kind of monkey i'd probly just get RAID5 anyway...

Well - you need 3 or more hard drives plus a raid 5 compatible raid card, which costs an order of magnitude more than just an extrra hard disk and using your motherboards built in raid which is what you can do in raid 0 and 1.

RAID0 is only less reliable if a drive PHYSICALLY breaks, and this is fairly rare, only happened to me 4 times in the past 10 years. If the array fails but both drives are fine [can sometimes happen depending on the controller] you can just rebuild the array, no problems

So you've had on average a HDD fail approx every 2 years. I wouldnt call that reliable! The chances of a 7200rpm IDE hard drive physically failing are high enough as it is, the chances of one of 2 drives failing are too high for me to risk. Thats just me though, I had 2 x IBM Deathstars in Raid 0 years ago, one failed, i lost all. Not gonna do that again!

Aslong as you backup your data as you would with a single big HD its no different to having one big 240gig HD - just faster

Well theres a higher chance of you losing your array due to physical faliure of one of the 2 drives. But apart from that, yes your right backup is so important and you should do backups no matter what raid technology your using.

Butuz

[Rythmic]

I think you can get a bit of a boost in the read performance with RAID 1.

I'll just check it.

Yep here it is

Yup - unfortunately most cheaper controllers don't do reads from both drives in a RAID 1 array. The ones that do advertise this as "RAID 1.5" (as if RAID 0 wasn't bad enough - it's not redundant!)

Yes Spudz, I've only had two drives go in the last 8 years (both deathstars), and RAID will only protect your from hardware failure. But theres a lot of people out there who have built up large collections of files (I personnaly have over 70GBs worth I'd hate to lose) - and backing those up to CD, or even DVD, is a pain to say the least. RAID1 allows them to feel a little more secure - though it should never replace backups.

[Butuz]

Yup - unfortunately most cheaper controllers don't do reads from both drives in a RAID 1 array.

Yes this is true from what i have seen, all of your ~£40 raid 0/1 cards and the on board motherboard controllers are like this. Thus i stand by my statement that on average Raid1 is slower then just a single hard drive. (Because ill wager most of you have not spend £200+ on an adaptec IDE raid card which will bring performance benefits)

Butuz

[BlackSheep]

I agree with Spud on this one - as his 1st statement is true:

RAID0 is indeed no less reliable, however, it is far less fault tolerant ... the idea that RAID1 magically makes your hardware more reliable is a fallacy, it does however guard you somewhat from a critical disk failure (although if both fail you are scuppered).

If you think you really do need RAID1 I think you should be considering more reliable drives (SCSI or Raptors) - but there is a price penalty in doing so.

Do proper backups of anything you can't afford to lose and run them in RAID0 for speed and economy of storage