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software RAID 0, on 2 RAID 0 hardware arrays?

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attack

Member
Joined
May 23, 2002
Say you have 2 RAID controllers or a 4 channel RAID card and setup 2 RAID 0 arrays. So the OS sees 2 drives...can you then setup a software RAID 0 on those arrays? If it could work would it be faster than just one RAID 0 array? just an interesting thought...
 
lmao i dont think it would be possable but wow thats really digging deep for speed.

you could do it with 4 drives in raid0 on a single controller but compounding the raid as your asking doesnt sound very efficient.

hmm i still cant say it wont work tho.as in theory it should.
 
I'm sure you could do it, but it might be kindof risky. It also might eat up a lot of CPU clock cycles too. I'm also pretty sure that you can't boot from a software RAID array.
 
Some SCSI hardware RAID controllers do something similar to this with RAID-1, but I've never seen it attempted with two hardware arrays over software. The proprietary implementation for a single controller, that I use, is known as RAID-1E and consists of 2 RAID-0 arrays as the logical disks of a RAID-1 array. I've also seen redundant controllers, but they're limited by controller manufacturer and backplanes. For sheer speed, a four disk RAID-0 array will be faster as deathstar13 suggested.
 
We have it on some of our IBM fibre arrays and I have tested this several times on our scsi drives; I saw basically no improvement in performance. I am not saying it won't work, I just haven't as of yet found it to be beneficial.
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Dave
 
I first would not recommend software arrays, fairly unstable since theyt are controlled by the OS and not a controller bios (IE, hardware) And you also cannot boot from software raid's since the software is in the os and therefore the os must be loaded for the raid to be working. :D
 
I'd recommend software raid over the typical firmware raid controller unless you were doing raid5.

Most ide raid controllers you buy do the work in the driver. With software raid, you wouldn't have to fool with a lame driver. You'd have more flexibility. And you'd be able to move the raid around without keeping the controller.
 
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