Win2000 raid question

[zabomb4163]

I know windows2000 pulls off decent software raid. I want to know if it would be possible for me to buy 2 SCSI hd's and run them on software raid like many do with ide.

is this possible?

 

[Xaotic]

There are a couple of small issues with W2K's RAID. First, it only handles levels 1 and 5, ruling out RAID-0 for speed. Next, if the drive is to be bootable, it has to be RAID-1, software RAID-5 is non bootable in W2K. The final issue is that the disks must be dynamic disks and are normally inaccessible to DOS for troubleshooting. W2K has an option for creating spanned volumes, but it will not help with transfer rates.

RAID-0 on SCSI is easily possible, just very expensive for the fast drives and hardware controllers. Trust me on this one, VERY expensive. I'm posting from a pair of 15K drives in RAID-0. Count on spending more money than you think to get it running correctly.

 

[zabomb4163]

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/raid-02.html#raid_0_via_software

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=303184

Xaotic- Windows 2000 does support software raid, what i need to know is if it supports software raid using SCSI drives

 

[mbentley]

i see no reason why it wouldn't support the software raid as the file systems are the same on ide and scsi drives... they're both going to be fat, fat32, or ntfs...

 

[XWRed1]

Win2k will raid scsi drives just fine... it doesn't care what kind of interface the drives are on.

It can do striping too. Or it should be able to. I know at least one guy who uses Win2k to do software striping.

 

[strokeside]

Well I'm using two U160 SCSI drives in a Win2K software RAID(0) array. My transfer rates are only about 1.75 times that of my ATA133 drive.
Win2K cluster sizes are huge. The options for them are default (don't know what this size is, then 256, 512, 1024 and up.
Most IDE Raid cards have 16 and 32.
My drives work fine, and it does smake a difference when loading levels in games. I think I might look for a proper 32bit PCI SCSI raid card though. Would improve performance by a good few percent.

 

[Xaotic]

My bad on the stripe, but I seem to remember that it can't be bootable as it's created in either disk management or CLI.

 

[zabomb4163]

yeah i knew it couldnt boot. But would i get better disk performance with (2) 10,000rpm scsi on Win2K software RAID(0) array or 2 WD 8m cache on RAID0

 

[Xaotic]

It depends on a number of factors. Is it on a normal PCI 2.0 32/33 bus? If it's on the system in your sig then total bandwidth would be limited to 133MB/s including all PCI cards and devices. Two RAID arrays on such a bus will run into contention for the available bandwidth and likely slow down both arrays. The next question is which SCSI drives, interface, cables/terminators and controller? U160 drives and controllers would most likely give better performance, but get expensive fast. If it's older Ultra2 SCSI drives and or controller then performance would probably be slower. The other variable is the WD drives themselves. I've seen a number of people over at Storage Review that have had performance issues with the WD 8MB buffer drives. Hopefully, you don't have this situation.