raid ?

[zman]

I've got a abit kg-7raid and I just got a second hd.IDE 1 and 2 are full.I put both(wd 400bb) hds on IDE3 one master one on slave(i want to use them as c: & d:)is this the way to do it or have two masters one on IDE3 and IDE4?
thanks!!!

[WillysNut]

You can use RAID in a Master/Slave setup on a single IDE channel but the performance gains are minor. If your using RAID 1 (mirroring) instead of RAID 0 (stripping), then I suppose that setup would be fine. The ideal setup for RAID 0 which offers the greated performance increase is to use a single IDE channel for each drive.

What is occupying the other channels...cd drives?

[zman]

I have a cd and dvd on ide1,cdrw on ide2 and have had trouble w/hd and cds on same ide.now i have a bigger problem i have hds on ide3 s/m and when i start win xp to format hd2.it wouldn't find cdrw and and error screen comes up i winxp and restarts windows?I don't get it!!! oh and i don't know anything about raid,stripping,or what ever else i bought it to have 4IDEs i want to use them as normal one to copy game cds so I don't have to insert the cds to play a game and install the games on the c:from the d:make since?

[WillysNut]

Arent there a total of 4 IDE connectors on your board? Have you tried putting the CD and and CD/RW in a slave/master setup on one channel. Your DVD on a second channel (Make sure it's set to master). And then the two drives on channels 3 and 4 (or 1 and 2.. Whichever ports are connected to the onboard RAID controller)?

RAID 0 is Stripping. RAID 0 stripes the system data across the two drives. Both drives contain part of the data needed. In turn, running each drive on its own channel, allows for great performance. RAID 0 is really an performance upgrade.

RAID 1 is Mirroring. Drive 1 and drive 2 are an exact copy of each other. If one drive happens to fail, you have a redundant drive which contains a copy of the vital info. RAID 1, and 5 (won't get into that one) are used more in the business world.

[Boilerhead]

I have a KR7A-RAID on the way and 4 of the 20G Maxtor ATA133 drives to play with and I have been wondering about the best way to set them up for performance.

I have hard drives coming out of my ears including a bunch of other ATA100's so I don't need to use any of the ATA133's as system drives.

With only two RAID channels is it possible or even desirable to stripe across all 4 drives? Would there be any noticable performance increase over just striping two drives? If I stripe the two channels and mirror with the slaves how much of a perf penalty can I expect?

I have only messed with RAID on a FreeBSD unix system (3 LVD SCSI disk stripe set mirroring to an identical array) so I don't have any experience with peecee wintel RAID setups yet.

The system I'm building is really just for experimenting with and running MSTS, I'm a train nut. I figure I'll end up redoing it several times before I have a fast and stable system worth using for a while. I am interested in getting texture data off the drives and into mem fast so I don't get the 3d herky jerkies.

I'm putting the system together from scratch so I have all the options in the world to play with right now. Everything's on order and I have the GeForce3 Ti 500, 21" Viewsonic and several 100-BaseTX nics already. I also have a bunch of Altec Lansing subwoofer setups to use for now until I cobble up some sort of crazy sound system to annoy the neighbors even more.

The stuff on order now is:

KR7A-RAID
XP1900+
4x256 OCZ PC2700
4x20G Maxtor ATA133
Audigy Platinum eX
Koolance case w/extra CPU block for GF GPU, Northbridge block and two master and sec HD coolers (I figured I'd try this thing before homebrewing a WC setup)
500 watt Dual Fan ATX Switching PS (Enermax clone?)
Silver round ATA and floppy cables
52x plain old CDRom (have RW's and DVD's on other machines)
requisite floppy drive
Enermax 80mm Adjustable Fan (have a whole pile of 120's too)
Logitech Cordless mouse and keyboard

Win2K will go on it, 98 has never been stable enough for me on anything, I'll live with any speed penalty from that.

Obviously I want to OC this pig and experiment. My only reservations are really with the Koolance case and the DDR. I would like to pick up a stick of 512MB DDR333 if I can find it. If the Koolance doesn't get the job done then I'll start haquering it up and make it work right :P

I have an assortment of fans and sinks to add where necessary with some Arctic Silver, I'm thinking vid mem and DDR cooling possibly.

I'm also going to order a 1.4 t-bird to initially use as a 'dyno mule' so I don't smoke the 1900+ right off the bat.

So, I'd like to get the RAID set up for max speed before I go off and start screwing around with any other wild HD setups.

Anyone see any gross problems with this setup as a starting point for a machine to play with? What else might I want to think about?

Anyone have any conception of what the potential upper clock limit of a 1900+ on a KR7A-RAID should be? I'm prepared to hack the mobo and proc if necessary and I have all the tools. Pin 7 mod will be a quick one.

Sorry for going on and on like that, I just get going sometimes...

Henry

[Jon]

Striping 4 drives over 2 does increase performance quite a bit. Depending on how you use your PC will determine if you ever "see" that performance gain.

If 2 of the drives would just go to waste if you don't stripe all 4, then I would do it. Otherwise, for redundancy (backup) I would set up a RAID 0+1 to keep all my stuff safe.

[Kendan]

Here is a site for anyone with or thinking about a KG7 or KR7:
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kg7kr7/kg7kr7faq.htm

check it out.

[Boilerhead]

Originally posted by Jon
Striping 4 drives over 2 does increase performance quite a bit. Depending on how you use your PC will determine if you ever "see" that performance gain.

The reason I decided to build this thing was because I am sick of the poor performance I get with MSTS on a GA-8TX P4 14. at 1540 with a GeForce3 Ti 500. The 8TX mobo is junque for OC, RIMMS just blow in general and plain jane ATA100 is slow. I never cared about 3d anything until I started creating my own historical trains in MSTS and started modifying a route to recreate the prototype. I like running the trains in winter with the snow falling for my sim and with Riva TNT 32 megger I had in that POS P4 I was crawling down to 3 or 4 fps when things got busy and a texture had to load. You could see the drive light flicker sometimes and if it was already bogging down you'd see 5 to 10 fps drop off.

I got the GeForce3 Ti 500 figuring that would make a big difference in performance and while it is unquestionably a solid gain in fps I still get down to 12 or so fps at times. I figured the GA-8TX was just a POS even at 1540 with the GeForce at 265/550 and I had seen a friend's KT266 with an XP1700+ Visiontek old GeForce3 bone stock just SCHWING along when running in conditions close to my sim. At that point I decided it was time to stop fiddling with that junque 8TX and build something decent JUST FOR FUN.

The only purpose of this box will be to run MSTS and OC. I haven't played with IDE RAID yet so I figured I'd give that a shot before I dump major bux into a serious array. If it works out well, then great, if not, oh well.

I've seen precious little out there on KR/KG7 RAID ultimate performance configuration testing and I know that the IDE channels behave differently than the SCSI I am used to, so I'm still unsure what the performance difference between a 2 disk stripe and a 4 disk stripe will be with the KR7A-R, but I'm sure going to find that out.

I'm not so concerned about data integrity as it's a for fun box and the only critical data will be my custom MSTS file which are always backed up through the network to at least one other machine and the IDE0 master will be the system disk, the RAID will be for data only. I also use XXCopy for disk to disk backups when need be. Being from the unix server world, I don't ever lose mission critical data, I religiously back up daily :)

Oh yeah, the POS 1.4 P4 gets 7071 2001 3DMarks clocked at 1470, frankly that surprised me, I thought it would be more like 5500 or 6000! 3DMark 2K1 dies at 1540 so I have no idea what difference there would be. My P3 1ghz notebook did 442 LOL!

Henry