Raid question

[soulburner]

Do you have to have the same 2 hard drives for this to work? would a 20 gig and 40 gig work together? are there any speed advantages to having a raid configuration or is it mainly for data protection? Thanks for any
info or links that mmight be useful?

[blade_146]

They dont have to be the same but it would be better cause if you put a 20 gig and a 40 gig together, the array will be set by the smaller of the 2 drives and you'll lose 20 gigs of your 40 gig drive. You follow? There are speed advantages and data protection advantages. it just depends on what mode you want to run it in. RAID 0 would be for speed. Sorry I don't have any links to give you but when others get out of bed I'm sure you'll get some.

[M_Six]

Hey soulburner,
Check this thread. It has a lot of good info on RAID. Come back with questions, if you have any.
http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/For...ML/007859.html

[KillerBug]

I don't know if he mentioned it, but here are the options that most end user raid cards come with...

1.) Stripe: takes the size of the smallest disk assigned to the raid drive and multiplies it by how many disks there are assigned to it. Fast.
2.) Mirror: Take 2 drives, everything you do happens to both. When one dies, your data is still on the other. Normal speed, extra security.
3.) Span: Take the total mb of all the disks in the raid drive, and that is your drive. This is the only form where if you have one 5gb and one 9gb you will end up with 14gb.

[soulburner]

I think I have the general idea now, but one more quick question. if I have a Raid 0 configuration how does ghost, or drive image work in recovering the drives, if something was to happen to one of the HD's? would I have to have 2 drives up and running before the image would restore or would it restore to only one drive so that I could be running with only drive providing that the image was not bigger than the smallest drive installed?

[M_Six]

If you have Raid 0 and you lose a drive, the data on the other drive is also lost. The only way to recover is to fix the hardware problem, restablish the stripe set (Raid 0) and either restore from tape or Ghost image. Ghost will see the two drive stripe set as one volume and will ignore what data is on what drive. In truth, no full files are all on one drive. On a stripe set, the data gets written in 64(?)bit increments right across the disks. It doesn't stop to keep a single file, say, on one disk. Even a small file may be divide between the two disks, so when you lose a disk, you lose every other 64(?) bit string, essentially making Swiss cheese out of your data. The problem with Ghost is finding a place large enough to store your image file that you can also access for recovery.

Raid is a great way to go, you just have to know what you're doing and be aware of the consequences.

EDIT: I just realized I missed your question. Yes, you can restore to a single drive from Ghost PROVIDED the image is not larger than the drive. Sorry I missed that the first time.

[This message has been edited by M_Six (edited 08-13-2000).]

[soulburner]

Guess I will go with a Raid 0 configuration
just will have to make backups regularly just as if I had one drive. but I will get a performance boost for games and such.
Thanks guys for the Info I ordered another 20 gig drive so that will give me a 40 gig (give or take) most likely to take hehe. is the limit 64 gig under win 98?

[soulburner]

1 more question, I just purchased the raid controller and a 2nd HD. in order to get this up and running (Raid 0)am I going to have to format and reinstall windows, or can I just pop in the raid card connect the HD's with my current setup?