W2K Software RAID????

I have heard this and was wondering if the software is really there or not. and how do I do it. anyone with a link to something that tells me how to do it or can explain how to do it is appreciated. Also is the software already installed on my hard drive right now or do I need to use the Win2K install disc??

Thanks

I would type out a long explanation, but I am too lazy. And you might understand it better reading from here But I will be happy to answer any of your questions should they arise.

captain_amd said:

I have heard this and was wondering if the software is really there or not. and how do I do it. anyone with a link to something that tells me how to do it or can explain how to do it is appreciated. Also is the software already installed on my hard drive right now or do I need to use the Win2K install disc??

Thanks

Click to expand...

-yes its there
-no you shouldnt do it
-its already installed, you have to upgrade the disks and convert and all that crap
-you can only do RAID 1 if you want windows to boot from it, cant do RAID 0 or 5 or spanned volumes
-very very very bad idea.
-if you want raid, splurge 40 or so bucks for a nice promise card... and do your RAID 0 or 1. the software raid in 2K is crappy and not true RAID anyways as far as redundancy is concerned. if you want info on it. go to your desktop on the 2k machine and hit F1 key (for help) in the search box type "dynamic disks" and hit enter.. read all that.

-and then go with the promise controller......seriously

Yeah I agree. I have setup a Spanned Volume between 2 80gig drives. The performance absolutley sucks and I can't revert back because I would loose all my data. I wished I would have known that before I created it.

I've never had problems with Windows' software raid.

I find software raid to be preferrable to the typical firmware raid that most ide raid controllers use. I've got a pair of raptors in my box right now, software striped, and they are faster than the hardware striping of the controller I'm using.

In addition to that, they are more flexible and easier to manage since I'm using software raid.

I'd only use hardware raid if I needed hotswap or was doing raid5, I think.

I've done spanned volumes, performance was fine.

Granted, all this stuff I'm talking about wasn't with Windows' software raid. Maybe it is exceptionally crappy, but there's no reason out of hand that it should be. Using Vinum on Freebsd and LVM on Linux, spanning is just fine. Linux software raid is fine too. I've used software mirroring and striping on Windows a little, and it seemed fine there, but I didn't get to smash it.

XWRed1,


Can you elaborate a bit more? I am very interested since yours is the *first* opinion I read suggesting sw RAID works OK. (Most other comments I've read say it is crap.. maybe because all are talking about WIN2K sw RAID)

Can you please post some details about your setup and comparision, (i.e to what hw raid are you comparing), as well as performance data (STR would be great), and reliability data such as :
- SCSI or IDE, and for how long have you been running it (and hours/day)
- Have you suffered power outgages, how many times (estimated)
- Have you had to recover your array (on RAID setups with redundancy such as RAID1 or RAID5), how many times, what nits did you encounter?
Comments on strip size being, was it difficult to set up, heat , CPU usage, other problems ...

Thanks and regards
FTC

One of the reasons overclockers are generally against software raid is that if your OS gets hosed or damaged, there goes ALL your data on the spanned volumes as well. As opposed to the safer method of having an OS partition and everything else seperate. This is the only drawback that I see, and if I had a system that was not overclocked and happened to have an excess of hard drives, I'd probably give software raid a shot too, be it LVM or Win2k dynamic disks.

Ah, software RAID. I think you will find this read very interesting. It is long, and was created in 2001, but should clear up many of the questions you have.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491

I still would very highly suggest not doing it

I think you missed the reason why I pointed you to that article. Most of these RAID cards are software cards. They are just like winmodems and AC97 audio cards.

On PAGE 6 it says:

"Software RAID is the RAID controller type that is found integrated onto a number of motherboards and available as a low cost PCI card. These cards are really nothing more than a slightly specialized IDE controller Software RAID cards appear to function as an IDE controller with the ability to stripe or mirror data, but this is not actually the case. Software RAID controllers do not actually perform the striping or mirroring calculations but rather call upon the CPU to perform these functions. When a file is sent to a software IDE RAID controller, the controller passes along the data and the stripe size and the details of the data to the CPU which then does the dirty work of figuring out how the file is broken up and what goes where.

Once the CPU has done its job, the information is passed back to the software RAID controller and then written to the disks in the array just as an IDE controller on the southbridge of a chipset would do. Since the CPU is actually the brains behind the software RAID solutions, RAID 5 ability is typically not provided on these cards. This is because the parity calculations that RAID 5 require (the XOR operations) are rather stressful. If they were passed to the CPU they would require quite a bit of CPU time and power. The striping calculations, on the other hand, are fairly stress-free on the CPU. Just how much CPU power these cards required would have to wait for the benchmarks.

Hardware RAID cards bypass the CPU and instead perform the striping calculations on an integrated controller chip. The most common chip used for these calculations is the Intel i960. Because data is processed on the card, hardware RAID solutions are much more complex than software RAID cards. Hardware RAID cards must include memory for cache as well as extra controls to power the i960 brain."

So the reason my software RAID is slow is because both drives use the same cable? If so, would seperating the drives to different IDE chains cause any loss of data?

Going to separate channels would definately help performance. Only one drive can talk on a channel at a time, so if you are striping you are ruining the stripe since the drives can't transfer data at the same time.

As for data loss.. that probably depends on how well your controller handles one of the drives moving to another channel, if you are using "hardware" raid.

No, I'm using the software RAID built-in to Win2k.

WOW.... Thats the most answers I have gotten to a question since I have been here....

Thanks for the articles... I am just going to get the promise raid card. Can I use IDE 7200RPM WD 8MB 40GB Drives for this??? How many can I use cause I want to put three of them together or should I do 2 sets of 2 or something????

Thanks

You could RAID-0 4 of them together. But at that point it would probably be cheaper to buy a 160GB single drive.

I think I am going to get 2 120GB Drives and RAID them. Then use my current 40GB as a storage drive for some movies, pictures, etc. Think those would be fast. The WD 7200RPM 8MB.

Is there a 10K RPM IDE drive anywhere? or would I need a scsi drive and controller card for that. maybe that would be a better route.

Those cheetah drives are quiet big though and I think I could only fit on in the drive cage. that doesnt do me any good. Any Suggestions???

captain_amd said:

I .

Is there a 10K RPM IDE drive anywhere? or would I need a scsi drive and controller card for that. maybe that would be a better route.

Click to expand...

Western Digital makes one, check thier site.. dont know of any retailers for it though.

I got mine from Newegg.

captain_amd: Aprilia, nice bikes!!! Just wanted to through that in. Sorry.