To Raid, or not to Raid

[VaCreeper]

I just upgraded to a Epox 8RDA3+ MOBO and a AMD XP3200+ ;)
This is my first foray into a Raid capable board and I seem to have started off wrong. Changing out the board went without incedent. Booted OK. I set the Bios to Fail Safe, and before Windows started I got a screen that told me to enter the Raid Utility by pressing control "C", or "F4". ( This acomplishes nothing ) and the screen adds the comments', " Primary Drive not found" and Secondary Drive not found".
Then the Windows Startup Screen comes up and runs for a few seconds, then I get just a flash of a blue warning screen, before it reboots. After reboot, I get the " Windows Filed To Start " screen( Doh!, tell me something I don't know )

I am going to study up on Raid today, and must admit I have not a clue about it at this point. Needless to say any help would be greatly appriciated.

TY:t

Creeper

[VaCreeper]

From what I've read so far on this forum is that Raid/ SATA can be a pain in the tukas. Have I made a mistake buying this board? I did get it as opposed to the 8RDA3 because of the expandability for future drives, but had no idea it was going to be a problem with my current HD's :(

Bummer! Should I just RMA or can I work around?

TY:t

Creeper

[The Lodge]

Are you using sata drives or ide? Did you do a clean install when switching boards? What kind of board are you switching from?

[VaCreeper]

Thanx for the reply. I'm useing IDE HD's, and no clean install. The board I replaced was a EPOX 8RDA with a AMD XP 2600+.
I shudder to think about a reformat, although I do have everything backed up on another drive on the same machine. I guess I could format my master drive, and then get things back from the slave. Is this what you are thinking?

TY:t

Creeper

[VaCreeper]

Basically I answered my own question. I had left all my PCI cards on, and once I removed them I could boot into Windows and go from there. In my defence it was late last night when I was changeing out the board :D , and I wasn't thinking.
Raid drivers are installed and now I can try to figure out what (if any) good they will do me. LOL

Thanx again!

Creeper

[The Lodge]

Next time you do a clean install, or boot to the windows disc make sure to hit F6 to install raid or scsi drivers. Glad to hear ya figured it out.:t

[causticVapor]

The 8RDA3+ has raid ONLY for the SATA channels. This is because the third-party Sil3114 chip used has this capability.

No SATA drives plugged in? No drives ;)

[zybch]

RAID is also a bit over rated, especially when data integrity comes into play.
By using 2 drives as 1, you do get a nice speed improvement, but if somehting happens to one drive, you've lost everything on the 2nd one as well.
You could stick a 3rd drive in there to store the parity info so you could recover from a drive crash, but thats more $$.

[rusty4x4]

A good site for RAID can be found here. (http://www.m-techlaptops.com/raid.htm)

The more common versions of RAID are RAID 0 and RAID 1. What ZYBCH is stating applies to RAID 0 and is correct: if you use RAID 0 (striping), then you get speed, but chance losing everything. RAID 1 (mirroring) gives you redundancy, but the speed gain may not be realized. The most beneficial configuration is to have 3 HDs: two striped, with a mirror.

I've also lately become a fan of SATA. My ABIT NF7-S has the Sil 3112 controller, and I have 1 Samsung 80 GB SATA drive. Just make sure that when you go SATA that your motherboard supplies a driver floppy for the cotroller, or is otherwise easy to download. Sometimes it can be a little tricky trying trying to find the drivers. Hoping to try my hand at RAID in the near future.

[Bat25]

Basically I think raid is very overrated. You do get a tiny improvement with just SATA (If you use a raptor),and of course raid 0 get's you better speed. But im my business (the PC business) I see tons of people that lose data due to raid, and having to set up the stripe again - eventually most go to sraight SATA. However, there are motherboards that simply work better with raid, or rather the paticular controller that is implemented works better on that paticular motherboard. The Abit NF7-S is known to work much better than nearly all nforce2 motherboards with the Si3112a. Asus is pretty good. May others have "quirks" with raid and it's just not worth it. Intel of course has good raid with CH5. But still, for 90% or more out there including most high end enthusiasts - they don't need raid. If you can find a mobo with a good SATA controller that works well a raptor is truely worth it - but from my perspective on for single drive SATA (74 gig model). If SATA were 'native' on the mainboards without needing drivers other than regular chipset drivers then I think it would be worth it. For now, most can do just fine with PATA IDE drives with 8 MB cache. They are just as good as SATA and less problematic (IMO).

[causticVapor]

Realize if the RAID controller is strangulatedly attached to the PCI bus, that's an automatic performance drop right there. Two 10K drives can easily overwhelm the PCI bus in RAID 0 and thus the maximum performance from the setup can not be realized.

This applies to the Sil3112 and all other PCI-attached SATA or non-SATA RAID chips.

Compete with a sound card, NIC or (God forbid) gigabit NIC, and you have what can be described as a performance catastrophe.

This is why there are PCI-bus independent RAID solutions like Intel's ICH5R - and why PCI-X exists. It is one reason why the world is heading over to the higher-bandwidth switched architecture of PCIe.

[ocgwizard]

The best use of RAID0 is for a temporary storage of data when burning DVDs

RAID1 is great for mirroring your boot drive

Raid0 for your boot drive is overkill

I rip to my RAID0 array from a 16x DVD ROM in about 11-14 minutes (2hr movie), and burn in under 4min to 1 disc w/out extra compression w/ my Plextor 708A 8xDVD W/ DVDXCOPY GOLD.

[Bat25]

If you spend some time to get it right, and have a good controller it's worth it. I dont need it though. But I set it up all the time for my customers if they order it.

[ocgwizard]

A little info

When you use a pci RAID controller card your max throughput is 133mhz

Your onboard southbridge chipset solutions give a max theorytical throughput of 266mhz

SATA RAID0 has a max theorytical throughput of 300mhz

Pay a little extra for the mobo, save buying the card, have more throughput w/out competion from other pci cards, & have a extra pci slot

In my humble opinion

OCGW

Peace

[causticVapor]

RAID 0 isn't technically RAID as it provides no fault tolerance. I prefer to simply call it striping.

Raid 5 is the ultrakill for a home user. It's really the only sleep-at-night way to have theoretically doubled disk throughput though.

One major advantage Win2k/XP have over other OSs is that their dynamic disk feature, which provides software RAID functionality. It also removes dependency on a hardware controller, thus allowing dynamic volumes can be transported from computer to computer with ease. Of course there is no hardware XOR and it requires winxp. Something to look into though...and the cheapest way to implement RAID0 for a rip/storage array if you already have HDDs and don't want to invest in a RAID controller.

[ocgwizard]

Well I am not claiming to be the RAID "expert", but hardware RAID doesn't use cpu & mem resources and has the best throughput, so onboard RAID is the way to go for me.

By the way, I use a single disc for boot drive, my RAID array is a dedicated temp video storage drive for writing DVDs.

Eventually I will RAID1 the boot drive.

OCGW

Peace

[causticVapor]

I'm not saying software RAID is better than a hardware RAID card. On the contrary, hardware RAID is excellent in that it offloads bruntwork CPU cycles involving disk transactions to another processing unit. That is, hardware RAID that IS actually hardware RAID. Most non-enterprise solutions simply use the CPU for most of the bruntwork, and thus are no better than software.

None of cards discussed here have hardware XOR functionality.

Still, having a RAID card, even one that is lets the CPU do more work, is advantageous in that it is OS-independent and allows for striping without being tied to volumes.

If you have a motherboard RAID solution, by all means use it, as it will bring about a performance boost. It just won't deliver the performance boost of an independently connected solution or one using the X-bus.

Using a RAID card without striping the system partition is all a matter of taste - the same could be done through software alone, with the same CPU penalty. That is, unless the RAID card has a true XOR engine or RISC CPU onboard.

And as I said, most non-enterprise solutions don't have such things.

BTW, system partitions can be mirrored if made into dynamic volumes.

[ocgwizard]

Hello causticVapor

Thanks for the enlightening info

OCGW

Peace

[Tweb]

My friend has SATA raid0 an I have ATA 100, when opening games his is 300 % faster but plays the game the same as my rig. When rendering video his will do a 2 gig video in 1/4, more or less, the time as mine. When transtering files, LARGE, his is done when mine is less then half way done.

[causticVapor]

Yeah, everything HDD-limited will be faster in a striped array. Once data is loaded into RAM, however, and remains there (i.e. a video game) the bottlenecks become the CPU, memory, and video card for graphics transactions.

Everything involving intensive HDD use, however, will be faster when intensively using the HDD.

[dajogejr]

As mentioned...the only way I'd RAID0 a current SATA supported mobo is if you wanted to buy a pair of Raptors.

And...I'd always have a trusty old IDE drive for backup of files, etc.

I've had by RAID0'd Raptor PC for over 8 months now....not a single issue.

I built a buddy the same rig, pair of rap.'s, RAID0.

We both have an additional IDE Drive for our files, as well as image, or ghost, our RAID array to the IDE drive about once a month.

I don't think SATA drives are worth it...if you're not gonna get the raptors...

Price per GB, is their biggest drawback, I can see.

I can tell you it's overkill on my system...but, it was an experiment from the beginning...(and...a tax write off...:)