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Enter The Matrix: Slice out and get the best part from your hard drives

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How big and how many drive are you guys working with?

I´m getting 2 WD6401AALS for the RAID 0, that makes 2x640GB ~ 1.3TB

I already have a WD6401AAKS (640 GB), and a couple 300GB PATAs as well (I was not even sure about using both of them, but I could use 1, both or none).
 
How big and how many drive are you guys working with?

I have worked with mixes of 2; 3; 4 & 6 drives in varying sizes from 80Gb right up to 1Tb, in mixes of raid0; raid0/raid1; raid0/raid5; raid0/raid10; raid 5; raid10.

All have worked flawlessly, but I have an SSD arriving by courier this morning.

Until I can afford more of them, that will be it for a while.
 
Gents, wonderful thread. :thup:

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason I lost my RAID 0. It claims within MSM the drive is "Missing", however, the drive is recognized and comes up as a NON-RAID drive.

Anyone have a way to re-initialize the matrix RAID so I dont have to rebuild? I also moved the drives out to another ICHR and getting the same "Missing drive" error.

Am I poop out of luck and back to a restore? Suggestions/recommendations? Thanks! :D
 
Gents, wonderful thread. :thup:

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason I lost my RAID 0. It claims within MSM the drive is "Missing", however, the drive is recognized and comes up as a NON-RAID drive.

Anyone have a way to re-initialize the matrix RAID so I dont have to rebuild? I also moved the drives out to another ICHR and getting the same "Missing drive" error.

Am I poop out of luck and back to a restore? Suggestions/recommendations? Thanks! :D

Do you need to recover the data? or you ya have a back up already?

You'll need to remove the entire RAID array, then re-create it. Do not format it!!!

Then down load a program called testdisk...

This program will see all the data with this program only. you'll be able to recover all of it.
 
You'll need to remove the entire RAID array, then re-create it. Do not format it!!!

Then down load a program called testdisk...

Excellent. This is exactly what I need. It's my OS drive. I sure hope this works, would save me time.

I do have a backup, but it's the beginning of this month, so I would lose a decent amount of data. Worst case scenario now. Thanks and cross your fingers! :D:thup:
 
Excellent. This is exactly what I need. It's my OS drive. I sure hope this works, would save me time.

I do have a backup, but it's the beginning of this month, so I would lose a decent amount of data. Worst case scenario now. Thanks and cross your fingers! :D:thup:


You'll be about to get your data, however you will not be able to boot again...
 
Thank you very much fritzman! And thanks for the welcome message :beer:

Yes, I was also thinking about doing what you suggested: doing a smaller RAID 0 (lets say 10% ??), for the OS. But then, I do NOT need to do anything different with the rest, I would like to have it in RAID 0 as well (since I have a 3rd disk for backups/images), so.. in this situation, does it have any advantage to use matrix ??? If I just RAID 0 the whole thing.. and make just a smaller partition first, wouldnt it be like short stroking in that partion, and still, having a good performing "normal" RAID 0 in the rest ??


Anyone else on this ?? I´m getting the disks today !! :D

Thanks
 
RAID 0 has at least twice the probability of losing data of a single drive. 4 times if you used 4 drives, etc.

Any kind of RAID, no matter how robust, is not an acceptable back up strategy ;)
 
RAID 0 has at least twice the probability of losing data of a single drive. 4 times if you used 4 drives, etc.

Any kind of RAID, no matter how robust, is not an acceptable back up strategy ;)
For enterprise level certainly, and I will go with that on the home level as well, though a R0+1 has the data on both drives in case one craps out on you so you are still a net wash as far as mitigating a complete hdd loss risk.
 
Try Active Undelete... works for me and has a raid-recreator that I haven't had a chance to play with yet... just might fit the bill for you.
 
How are these results ?
4xWD6401AALS / write back cache enabled.
Only drivers installed no apps.
 

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Firstly.. a very big W E L C O M E

Those results look great... Everything appears to be as it should, and 7.1 access is also pretty good.

I would suggest you shout yourself a beer!
 
Firstly.. a very big W E L C O M E

Those results look great... Everything appears to be as it should, and 7.1 access is also pretty good.

I would suggest you shout yourself a beer!
Thanks for replying I have been doing a lot of reading regarding raid and after my first WD VelociRaptor went dead after 1 yr I decided to look for an alternative setup.
I was inspired by the post here.
http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=6074590&postcount=1782
to be honest I googled everywhere and could not find this kind of tests performed by these drives anywhere else :)
 
I'm not suprised that you were inspired... those results are among the best I have seen.

I managed to get the access time down to either a flat 6.0 or 6.1 iirc with my 4 x 1Tb Black W/D's, but don't think I even matched some of the other numbers he got.

I've moved away to a single (for the moment) SSD and the 4 x 1Tb drives as storage alone.
 
I'm not suprised that you were inspired... those results are among the best I have seen.

I managed to get the access time down to either a flat 6.0 or 6.1 iirc with my 4 x 1Tb Black W/D's, but don't think I even matched some of the other numbers he got.

I've moved away to a single (for the moment) SSD and the 4 x 1Tb drives as storage alone.

6.0 is fantastic :thup:
I do wish to find out how he got the first volume to go to 635 /s read in hd tach.

As for the RAID 5 ... i found it impressive I got RAID 10 here and the speed is not that great. I think it's because in RAID 5 uses 30% less space and that the read speed is comparable with RAID 0 while my RAID 10 uses just two drives for reading and writing.
If I am mistaken please correct me.

Here are my result for the second volume RAID 10
The pictures are with a 16k cluster and 64k stripe and 128k offset.
The file benchmark is interesting, I formatted the volume using a 32KB cluster and got this nasty read results.
 

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Hey guys just after some advice and thoughts.

I'm slowly planning a NAS/ home server build that will basically contain all my movies, vids and music etc.

It's going to be based around a Intel DG45FC mini-itx mobo that supports Matrix Raid!!

I currently have 1 Samsung Spinpoint F3 HDD and intend to buy 2 more so I can run a Raid 0/5 matrix raid - with the OS on the Raid 0 and media on Raid 5.

1. As I've never run a Raid Array I'm wondering if there are any procedures I should take that, in the unfortunate case of a drive failing, will make rebulding my Raid 5 array easier?

Do people suggest for example, taking an image of both "slices" before I start transfering all my data onto the NAS? Or if a drive fails is it as simple as just replacing it with the new drive?

2. I intend to make my Raid 0 slice as low as possible (~20GB), will this be ok?

3. Are there any preferences for which OS to use (that works best with matrix raid?), XP or W7. Have any differences been found between 32 bit and 64 bit?

4. What stripe size should I use given most of my files will be large .avi and a few .mkv's?

Maybe matrix raid is not the best option for me? (I hope not cos I've been wanting do try it for ages!).

Probz gonna order parts in the next few days but any info would be great!

Cheers guys:beer:

Sam
 
Hiya bud.

Having run a few different types of Matrix Raid now, and also run Windows Home Server... I would recommend having a bit of a read about the latter.

I know nothing about Linux and didn't really find the sort of 'file-serving' function in any of the XP/Vista/W7 builds I did, so looked at WHS, and now recommend it for both backing up and media serving in a home network environment. As an aside... it actually makes a lot of sense in some small business situations as you can do bare-metal rebuilds from the backups on the WHS.

In short... it will take any drives you give it and simply bundle them all up together as a storage drive. Within that, you can tell it to store everything in two places, so that if a drive fails, it's still safe in another place. You can also do that with the media that you have in place to share across the network.

I've been running one for several months now and really like it. I'm still learning the 'best' way to have everything, but it is pretty straightforward. I still have backed up individual users data to their own folders, but in reality, it could all simply be on their main PC's and backed up in the usual WHS manner... I just wanted a good start-point of having all the data saved in one central place.

On the other hand... if you do want to set things up using another O/S in a matrix array... I'd be seriously thinking about running a Raid5/Raid5 setup, as O/S speed will not be an issue for what you are doing. That way, if a drive drops its breakfast, the others simply carry on until you replace the stuffed drive, rebuild the new one when introduced (automatically) and carry on. Raid0/Raid5 on the other hand will simply not work when a drive does that, and rebuilding your Raid0 part will potentially give you a bit of grief, and leave your system down until the drive gets replaced and the Raid0 part rebuilt.

If you still want the questions you've listed answered... come back with them again, but in short...
1. If your Raid5 drops a drive, simply replacing the troubled drive as I said, is really simple... the O/S takes care of it all by itself.
2. You want the O/S part slightly larger than you need, as changing it later could cause you some grief (another advantage of WHS... it just takes whatever it needs).
3. O/S... I believe WHS to be the simplest and best for the role you've described, and haven't found other MS O/S's to do the job as well.
4. This is where you do need to experiment a bit with the Matrix... in general, defaults work jst fine, but for those using mainly large files (so not MP3's or the like) then larger sizes can provide a slight advantage in speed.

Hope that helps put you on the right path... "Which pill will you choose?" comes to mind.
 
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