Raid or not to raid That is the question I ask of thee

[BCN]

Well, if you have the recourses... So go RAID, man... I will go to it as son as I will my new system ready and serillel adapters available... SATA RAID...

[InactiveX]

I'd say it all depends on how important fast disk throughput is to you. If you need fast Disk I/O, go RAID0, otherwise stick with one drive and your data will be safer. Using 2 HDDs in RAID0 just doubles the chance of a disk crash resulting in permanent data loss.

I would also have thought that setting up dual booting with RAID partitions may be a little tricky, but I don't know for sure.

[BCN]

maybe it is because you had those IBM drives...

couls anyone else post some more experience, cause now I am not sure if I want to go RAID... And I planned for it already...

[kuun]

hmm

i dont like raid, too much trouble and headache

i prefer SCSI!

i have SCSI on my BP6 too!

basically im like this.. no raid and SCSI all the way!

Kuun

[onelegdis]

OK, I was thinking of going down the Raid path, but now you've got me worried!

I currently run a 20 gig(O/S and apps) and a 30 gig(Data, music, pics, my docs etc). Ive just got hold of 2 identical 10 gig drives and plan to switch my O/S and apps to Raid. The 20 gig would then be used for more file storage.

If this Raid set up goes "belly up" I dont lose my data, just my O/S and apps....yes?. If I mirror the Raid drives, do I need another 10 gig drive or a 20 gig?

Hope that makes sense!!! Life was so straight forward and simple.....then I bought a PC!

[RRLedford]

If you want IDE RAID for performance, striping lets two drives do the work of one faster - BUT the exposure to data loss is more than doubled, since your data is spread across two drives. If one goes, what's left on the other is almost useless.
If you want raid for redundency, then you get two inentical drives & mirror them - NO performance boost, just security.

If BOTH goals seem important, you will need to have FOUR DRIVES - two stripped & two to mirror each of the striped.

I would wait for the new Serial ATA products to appear before investing in old RAID concepts now. 1-2 months for product choices.

[Incubus]

I've had IDE RAID on my old crashed MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU with 2 IBM disks (striping). It ran great!!! So all I can say is go for it!

There is also an option of software RAID, so you don't need to buy an extra RAID controller.

But now I want to build a fileserver to store my data on and I'm thinking of buying a BP6 with 2x celeron 433 (the cellies I already own). If I run RAID0 on the BP6 (with a controllercard), should I get on my workstation, with crossed gigabit, a well thruoput, or won't it be much more than I would get with a 100 mbit card.

Now I run a single celeron 433 (non-RAID, with a 100mbit network card) and the throuput is horrible (arround the 2,5 MB/s). Has anyone has experience with this?

[Wolfram]

But the response time by the drives is faster using raid even with a mirrored drive over standard ide.

But how should that be achieved? I would expect a mirrored raid to be a bit slower than a single drive, because of the higher cpu and pci bus load.

Also I mention sound card troubles. If you look at www.2cpu.com there is a thread there on sound card troubles that some people asking about whether or not there is a problem with smp and soundcards?

There is problem with the Soundblaster Live!. Don´t know about other cards.

I use my BP6 for office work. So a mirrored drive would be interesting, but I´m afraid it would slow down the system.

Raid via Software / IDE is no option for a boot drive IMO. But SATA would be interesting because of the WD Raptor, especially the new model. Still much cheaper than a decent SCSI setup, and obviously with workstation performance on par with 15k rpm SCSI drives.

[24seven]

I used to use IDE raid a few years ago and a little bit more recently, 2x 4gb in a strip as my boot drive, then more recently 2x 8gb in a strip, and also mirrored for a while when I was doing important Uni. work.

When striped it was quicker than just a single drive, but it also let you do more, e.g. when something disk intensive is going on, you could still carry on using the computer normally. I find with single drives that once something is reading and writing to a drive you cant really use it until its finished.

With a mirror it is faster reading than a single drive, but it is the same speed when writing, my be a little slower, but not much.

The controller I used to use was a HPT370 with a drive on each channel.
I used the raid as my system/boot drive, all my other data was on a different drive.

The only raid I have had fail is when I took it out of my machine and tried to put it in my brothers machine so we could transfer some files, but his controller, which was the same make as mine, just killed it.

Also before I got the hardware controller (I say that loosely as the HPT controllers are not fully hardware) I used windows software raid with dynamic disks. It worked but I didn’t see much benefit from it as I wasn’t booting from it, but I did put a few games on to it to help with load times.

So if you are looking to make you system respond a little better I would say do a hardware strip raid and boot from it and keep all your data on a different drive.

If you want data security then boot from a single drive and make a mirror raid to keep your data on, this could be software or hardware, hardware being the quicker.

The only problem with a mirror raid is that you loose the space from and entire drive. With a strip of 2x13gb = 26gb of space, but a mirror of 2x13gb will only give 13gb of space.

If I understand correctly I would need two drives that match to mirror and if I stripe I guess it doesn’t matter

For any raid you are better off with drives that match.
If they don’t match it will use the size of the smallest drive.
E.g. 10gb and 13gb in strip would give 20gb space, 10gb and 13g in mirror would give 10gb.


David

[RRLedford]

OK, just got my new Promise SATA RAID 5 card which will take my spare 128MB DDR DIMM too.
Less than $170 for a caching RAID 5 controller (with 0MB) is not bad at all. Now I'm shopping for a deal on (4) SATA drives 120-160GB size for my new Dell Poweredge 600 server. Will report on the performance as soon as it is up & running.