RAID noob

[Pennarin]

Hi all, noob here. Heh

I have the money for more than one drive, but do not need storage capacity beyond about 750GB. I'm going for the 7,200RPM 750GB variety. I love my heardrums, so I'm staying clear of 10K and 15K varieties, which are currently too small for my needs anyway.

For ordinary everyday usage - apps, gaming, etc - would you recommend RAID 1 ? And if so, do I need any special kind of hardware add-on to my mobo? I never used RAID before...

 

[terran2k]

i used a 15K rpm cheater drive in my comp before I got my raptor. It was quiet, it had the fluid dynamic bearing, the read/writes were audible, i liked it though, read/writes with some power. what motherboard do you have, it may have built in raid support. I really think one raptor is sufficient for most users. raptor for your o/s/games. 7200rpm drive for storage.

 

[Pennarin]

EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW.

So two big capacity drives like that 750GB one, in RAID 1 for safety, and one independent 10K or 15K low capacity drive to play high end games?

Then how do you set it up so the system uses the faster drive to access or write down game-related data? I'm barely getting on understanding partionning and such basic drive settings as of yet, still a lot of way to go.

 

[benscoobert]

I think you may have missed a vital point
do you realise you need 2 identical drives for raid?

are you looking for speed or security

 

[Zerix01]

EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW.

So two big capacity drives like that 750GB one, in RAID 1 for safety, and one independent 10K or 15K low capacity drive to play high end games?

Then how do you set it up so the system uses the faster drive to access or write down game-related data? I'm barely getting on understanding partionning and such basic drive settings as of yet, still a lot of way to go.

When you install your games select the faster drive as your install drive. Any thing like MP3's or videos or anything that has low bandwidth needs and takes up a lot of space, save all of that to the larger 750GB array.

As for building the array, I assume your mother board has many SATA ports. I would just use those in software RAID rather than buy an expensive hardware RAID controller. Technically it would give you better performance to go hardware RAID but I doubt it would worth the money when your using RAID 1.

 

[GTengineer]

EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW.

So two big capacity drives like that 750GB one, in RAID 1 for safety, and one independent 10K or 15K low capacity drive to play high end games?

Then how do you set it up so the system uses the faster drive to access or write down game-related data? I'm barely getting on understanding partionning and such basic drive settings as of yet, still a lot of way to go.

After you create the RAID1 array then it will show up as two drives 1) your fast 10k rpm drive and 2) the single RAID1 (750GB) array (assuming you do two 750GB drive in RAID0). Then when you boot up your windows CD you simply install your OS to the 10k drive.

 

[Pennarin]

Okay, thanks all!

What kind of fast 10k drives are currently availlable? Some drives have special technologies that make them faster or perform better, but product pages don't always mention these things.

 

[mrgreenjeans]

I would just use those in software RAID rather than buy an expensive hardware RAID controller. Technically it would give you better performance to go hardware RAID but I doubt it would worth the money when your using RAID 1.

One advantage to a PCI RAID card w/onboard controller is that it can allow the whole array to be moved to a new machine with out loss of data. One thing to consider for a back up array.I wouldn't use it for a boot drive though.

 

[Zerix01]

One advantage to a PCI RAID card w/onboard controller is that it can allow the whole array to be moved to a new machine with out loss of data. One thing to consider for a back up array.I wouldn't use it for a boot drive though.

My thoughts on this when going software RAID (other than the cost factor) was having the ease of re-building the array on a new machine with no loss of data. I guess there are some differences I have not see between Linux and Windows software RAID. Another factor is I can access all the stats and error information I want from each drive without being at the mercy of what the RAID controller can't do. And to my understanding if the controller dies and you can't replace it with the same model or revision then you can not rebuild the array anyway.

 

[mrgreenjeans]

Yeah, but a software 0 raid is going nowhere and a raid 1 might salvage a drive but that's it. Every software RAID on current mobo's I've worked with had to reformat the drives on initial setup. I agree if the PCI card dies so does the RAID, but if the mobo dies there goes the software RAID and the drives will not work on another machine, period.

 

[Zerix01]

Yeah, but a software 0 raid is going nowhere and a raid 1 might salvage a drive but that's it. Every software RAID on current mobo's I've worked with had to reformat the drives on initial setup. I agree if the PCI card dies so does the RAID, but if the mobo dies there goes the software RAID and the drives will not work on another machine, period.

I see what you are getting at. Your talking about using drivers and utilities specifically for one motherboard or another. Yes then that would be about the same as the RAID card. I figured Windows had a utility that could just take two or more connected drives and turn them in to a RAID device and be controller agnostic. This is how I'm doing it in Linux. I use one program that I can install on any type of system on any distro and I can re-assemble the array. It doesn't matter that I have an Nvidia chipset with Nvidia RAID capabilities, they are all shut off and the system sees the drives by themselves. I then mount the array device which then lets me access the array as a whole.