To RAID or not to RAID?

[ablang]

No, I'm not talking about co-ed panty-stealing hijinx, but rather the computer term where you can link up multiple HDs in various ways.

Why would I want all my HD's to act as one, when if one were to die (one is from 1994), the whole system would lose all data?
Does anyone actually think this is a useful feature?

[3beanlimit]

In your case, probably not.

Lots of things to consider .....

How much data are you really saving?

One configuration is simply for speed and not for backup.

If I had a business, RAID would make a lot of sense. It would not only be faster than tape backup,(it works in realtime) you would have zero errors.

I'm assuming that you are familure with all the different configurations though. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[DVNT1]

As 3beanlimit said, ther are varius raid levels depending on your goal.

With Raid 5 you get an improved speed compared to a single drive and you get fault tolerance. If one drive fails then the system keeps going strong. You can replace the drive (often while the machine is still running but depends on the drives and controller) and the data will be reconstructed.

For home use I like the Promise Fastrakk IDE Raid controller (no Raid 5 though). It's relatively cheap and fast. True, if one hard drive fails then I lose a lot of data but I have backups for the important stuff. Besides, I REALLY like the speed improvement.

[AuraEdge]

Maybe you would want to span instead.
My guess is that that old harddrive is slowwwwww and in a RAID 0 (Striping) each drive is only as fast as the slowest hard drive. Plus its probably also pretty small..
In a RAID 0, the capacity is the size of the smallest drive * the number of drives.

Spanning just uses up one harddrive once and then goes onto the next one. I believe u get the full capacity of whatever harddrive your working on with that data, plus you get the full performance of whichever drive its on.
I think all RAID devices support this. However this would only be useful for large partitions spanning over the size of one drive, or if your desired partition sizes dont exactly fit the harddrive you want to put on them

[This message has been edited by AuraEdge (edited 12-22-2000).]

[Wilan Wong]

You would notice MUCH performance difference in real-world situations but maybe the syntentic benchmarks may tell the difference. Sure RAID is faster, but it only improves hard drive speed, and that only means faster loading application times (not 100% faster or something like that), we (home user) don't need such fast hard drive speeds, but it can have other useful features other than speed, such as spanning etc. My point being, is that hard drive performance makes a different impact on the performance of your system, depending on your requirements. But it can make the system considerably faster if you use it as a swap drive a guess.. IMHO http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[DVNT1]

AuraEdge brings some very valid points to consider.

Wilan Wong, for me the Raid makes what I do at home very fast. I have two 45gig Ultra/ATA100 IBM 7200rpm drives in a stripped configuration and it is great. I put a lot of material on CDs and it helps the prep time tremendously.

Also things like unzipping files, installing programs, writing wavs from mp3s, all those will benefit from striping (on similar speed drives). All which I also consider to be done by many "home users".

[Shagnasty]

I'm using three 40gb 7200rpm ATA/100 WD HD's
and I haven't set them up with RAID yet..I'm
using the Abit BE6II Raid MB...Compared to
my ATA/66 (Previous setup) I'm impressed
with the speed already..Would I really gain
much speed with the RAID setup>?

[ablang]

Yeah, I have 3 old legacy HD's, so I'm wondering if RAID will help me at all.

8.4gb
2.1gb
850mb

[DVNT1]

Shagnasty, can you define "much speed" http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif
It's too hard for anyone else to judge for you, but you do have good hard drives to start with. A Promise Fasttrak 100 Raid Controller costs about $120 US. ???

ablang, I'd suggest starting out on an up-to-date hard drive (and controller if needed) before trying raid for speed purposes.

[Richard_Cranium72]

So, hmmm

If you set up 2 ATA66 HD's in striping mode 0

Would this be faster than a singular ATA66 ?

Any specs as to HOW much faster.

I bought a couple of Iwill raid cards that came with 2 ATA100/66 type cables cause the cables cost more than the card alone.

Now I'm considering mirroring a couple of 7200 drives..

[DVNT1]

For some of the Promise IDE Raid controller speed specs. review some of these links...
http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardware_review.asp?review=cheetahx15&page=2
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=913
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9804/980414fasttrack.html

[surrealchereal]

Hey, doc, did you ever mirror those 2 drives?

[Ironforge]

I like RAID for two reasons

A) It does copy/move large files around noticeably quicker than a single drive..

B) You don't have to manage as many drives.. all the space gets slammed into one drive letter http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

I bought the ABIT hotrod RAID card.. it uses the HPT 370 chipset and is ATA/100.

Comes with the 80-wire ATA/66/100 cables and driver.. i bought it for about $30 US

[RobRich]

<IMG SRC="http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/abit-kt7-raid/sandradrive.gif" border=0>

Abit KT7-RAID
Thunderbird 800
256 MB PC-133
2 x Maxtor 7200rpm ATA/100 2mb buffer

This is from an older review here at SysOpt, so I would expect the resuts to have improved during this time due to recent HighPoint driver upgrades.

Robert Richmond

[LostBok]

Don't think you can RAID drives that are THAT different together... maybe software raid the smaller together and then map them to a directory under windows2000, otherwise, not much point!

But think about new disks on a cheap IDE RAID card:

Okay, this was done, while downloading a few files and surfing at the same time (I'm impatient), so may be a bit below where it could be:

I don't know how to upload pics, but the link is here:
http://www.geocities.com/lostspringbok\HPT370-2x40gig-IBM-GXP60.jpg

Basically 37+Mb/sec average on SiSoft Sandra 2001.

System spec (the bits that matter anyway):
dual P2-560Mhz (5x112Mhz)
TekRam P6B40D-A5 Dual PIII mobo
512Meg CAS2 PC133 (2x256meg) - mobo limit!
Chaintech HPT370 controller (PCI)
2 x IBM 40gig GPX60's on the primary channel - RAID 0 (benchmarked).
2 x Fulitsu 30gig Fluid Dynmic Bearing drives on secondary channel - no RAID.

The other HDD's, ZIP, CD-ROM, DVD, CDRW drives are on the onboard IDE or the AHA2940 SCSI card.

hope this helps - I reckon it IS worth it!

[harkm]

Ok, my 2 cents on RAID. I absolutely could not enjoy computing without RAID now that I have used it. The real bottleneck on your computer is the hard drive. A Windows NT system with Raid is very fast with only an Intel 233MMX. It isn't as fast with Win 98(I don't know why). You will be surprised how much your overall computing experience speeds up one you install RAID. I use the Promise FastTrack 66. I wish I had the FastTrack 100. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[otheos]

I wish I had the FastTrack 100.

What drives are you using for your RAID0 array? unless their max STR is more than 55MB/s you will not see any difference between the 66 and 100 controller.

With two 30MB/s STR drives you'll get less than 55MB/s STR on the RAID0 array, so even two 75GXPs will be fine.

[harkm]

Yes, I would have to get some new drives to enjoy the FastTrack 100. I am happy with FastTrack 66 for now.