RAID Question

[Novex]

I have the KT7a- RAID motherboard. I know to get the best performance i would have to have to use 2 of the same hard drives, but should they be the same size? i have a 20 gig 60gxp ibm drive now and would buy another 60gxp but since drive prices are so low i was thinking of getting a 60gig instead of 20. Im new to raid so any info would help.

[Sonny]

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS
.....and to the addiction:eek:

When you go RAID it would be better to use the same size & speed HD. If you use a 20G + 60G the raid set up will be limited to double the size of the smaller HD & its same thing with speed.

a. 20G + 20G = 40G

b. 20G + 60G = 40G(40G wasted space from the 60G HD)

c. xG 7200rpm + xG 5400rpm = xG 5400rpm

So it'll work but you will waste a lot of space.

[Novex]

thanks

[Novex]

Is the performance increase worth it. What are the benifits? More frames in games or faster loading? Is it that much better than two drives that are not used in a RAID config?

Also would you buy another 20 gig HD and go RAID or buy a 60 gig and have 80 gigs total but not have them in RAID?

[XprincoX]

well raid usually increases ur load times as it like having a 14400 rpm hd rather than 2 7200s. But then it also depends on what type of raid u use. I raided by system one, however my raid failed (broken stripe) so i was very close to loosing all the data in both drives. The performance increase wasn't that big either, so i just went back to ide... :burn:

As for larger drives, since u would only have like one 40 gig after raid, maybe getting another 60?

[Staz]

RAID has 5 modes

0 stripping- writes half info to one drive half to the other, Pros theoretically twice as fast, cons could courupt data- both hard drives need to be same speed

1 cloning- writes all info to both drives, pros you don't lose data incase of mechanical failure of one hard drive, cons if data becomes corupted it still becomes corupted on both drives- both hard drives need to be same size

0+1 does both of the above on 4 hard drives

spanning- treats all hard drives as one big hard drive

standard IDE- simple gives you 2 more IDE chanels

[Patchmaster]

There is also RAID-5 which does striping plus parity. You need at least three drives to implement this. It allegedly gives most of the speed benefit of striping and also provides a greater level of safety than RAID-0. If any single drive in the array dies it can be replaced without loss of data.