RAID Question

[Cerial_Killer]

OK I upgraded awhile back to a motherboard that as RAID but i disabled it since I didnt really know too much about it. My question is, am I shorting myself by not enabling it, and how would I configure my 2 drives if i needed too.

Thanks

[TheNamelessOne]

Well I don't know much about RAID myself, but I heard if you have two HD's in Raid it will recognize them both as the size of the smaller one so it's good to have both HD's the same size. I'm not sure if that's for all the types of Raid though.

[Ghost68]

well there are several types of RAID i will only go into 3 raid modes and something most RAID controllers come with

1.) Raid0
Also Known as Striping. (requires at least 2 drives) What this does is allow you to make two or more drives apear as one big drive (the total space on all drives is combined) and helps decrease write time by spreading the write load between all of the harddrives. esentially it writes a few bytes on the first hardrive the next few bytes on the next harddrive but it does this simotaniouslyso you are writing the data 2x as fast. raid0 also helps read times a little but not nearly as much as the writing... it has a few disadvantages tho first all of the harddrives must be the same capacity otherwise it will only use the capacity of the smallest drive in the array multiplied by the number of drives in the array. If one drive goes down all of the data is unuseable... also try to use drives rated at the same speed ex 7200rpm and ata100 otherwise the whole array will only be as fast as its slowest drive
examples:
2x 100gb harddrives will work as 1 200gb harddrive
1x 100gb + 1x 80gb harddrive will work as 1 160gb harddrive

2.) Raid1
Also Known as Mirroring. (requires 2 drives per array) what this does is write all data on both drives simotaniously esentially creating a backup drive in case one goes down. Disadvantages the drive is only as big as the smallest drive in the array if a slower drive is used it can effect the overall latency and cause writes to take longer

3.) Raid0+1
Also Known as Striping plus Mirroring. (requires 4 or more drives in sets of 2 ex 4 drives 6 drives 8 drives...) the best of both worlds depending on the size of the array 1 or more drive can be removed and the array will still work... Disadvantages requires alot of drives. only as fast as the slowest drive and only as big as the smallest drive in the array times the number of drives devided by 2

4.) Jbod
Just A Bunch Of Disks (requires 2 or more drives) it works by adding the total size of all of the drives and filling them up one by one so if you have a 20gb drive a 10gb drive and a 4gb drive it sees it as one 34gb drive only useing one drive at a time when one fills up it starts to fill up the next... there is no speed increase/decrease the array is only as fast as the drive the data resides on. i have had jbod arrays survive drives going out... as long as there was no data on the removed drive the array will continue to function(at a decreased size ofcourse).

oh almost forgot hehe your harddrives must be connected to the raid controller in you motherboard (or raid card) in order for you to use raid...

this post is officially the one that got me to 4 stars wahoooo

[NeoMoses]

you are not shorting yourself by not enabling RAID. Just make sure that you have as many of your IDE devices on seperate channels. This will increase the speed of copying data between drives.

If you have 2 identical hard drives, I would recommend you try RAID0. It's nice and fast.

[Ghost68]

Originally posted by NeoMoses
If you have 2 identical hard drives, I would recommend you try RAID0. It's nice and fast.

not always the case... its not faster for gaming.... but much faster for large graphics/video editing
essentially if you arent working with huge files 1gb+ raid0 isnt worth the risk... it did nothing but slow down the loading of my games... if you do raid dont store anything you cant replace on the array make sure you have a backup drive for documents photos... cause if the raid array goes down you loose everything on the array

[mbigna]

I disagree with Ghost68 about games. If you play games that load large levels, they will load almost TWICE as fast. Just make sure that you back up regularly (something we ALL need to make more of a habit anyway--even without RAID), because if one disk fails--it ALL goes south.

[deathstar13]

people who use raid0 dont complain about it,they recomend it.
even tho it costs alot more ,they still recomend it.
if i spent extra money i didnt need too, would i recomend it? lol NO!
this is my second raid0 rig ive done.i knew from day one of my planning it was gonna be raid0 in this one also.

it has its down sides as stated tho.i have nutten of importance stored on here i cant replace so im all for the speed.and yes it does make games load faster.

[x1xBugsBunnyx1x]

The promise Raid i noticed used alot more space after partitioning the discs :(
yes for video editing raid0 set the clusters as large as possible 64k seems to be abit faster..

[ninthebin]

I remember reading something about striping giving a slight performance hit in areas...that keeping track of the striping itself is using more resources than usual...although I should image that with most performance descriptions this will be exaggerated to a point that its probably not even noticable unless benchmarks tell you

[Ghost68]

well my new wd 100gb SE drive is 2x as fast as my old RAID array so thats what i base my observations on its better imho to get one really fast drive ex a western digital SE drive than a raid array (unless money is no object) i have lost gigabytes ov irreplaceable data because of how unstable raid0 arrays are and yes i do backup my data but not every night... my backup drive has over 60 gb of data on it just from my backups... if you are gonna do raid do raid0+1 or just raid1

[tainice]

well, i do love my raid0 setup, i can transfer some very large 700mb+ within 2 min....what a blessing!!