Hi,

I've recently cleared up 4x250gB hard drives, and am looking at putting them into a raid. I'm pretty much a raid newb, so if anyone could answer some questions that'd be great.

I have a cheap 4port promise sata card so no hardware raid.

Basically, I want it all raided together into one big drive but it'd be good if it was fault tolerant too, just in case it dies =(. I've been told that RAID5 would be my best bet. Also, it'd be good if there wasn't much mucking around in future setups (ie, after a format), but I don't know much about this.

What would be the best raid configuration (reliable but as much space left to me as possible, pretty much just storage speed would be good but isn't necessary), and how would I go about setting this up in windows xp ?

i wouldn't be raid'ing unless you have a hardware raid card.

really more trouble then its worth. eg: atm im fixing a computer with raid1 (mirror raid array) that is meant to be fault tollerant. It seems with this computer that the bios reset itself, and now it says that the raid is corrupt. So basically they lost all their data because they tried to protect it better.

If you have software raid, and the OS goes belly up, you are up s*** creek.

Here is a suggestion.. dont do it.

What them above said.

A software RAID is like wankin, sure it does the job but it's not half as good as a proper root (which in this analogy is obviously the hardware RAID).

actually on the same line: (sorry if it looks like im hyjacking ur thread but it may help you too)

im looking to buy a PCI-E (no spare PCI slots) x1 hardware raid that just does raid0/1 on SATA, anyone know where to get one?

www.staticice.com.au might have them in its db.

anyone is brisbane though? looking to get one in the next few days, not looking at spending more then 300$ :S

go outside

i would but the sun burns my eyes, people scare me and i cant walk without s***ting myself.

First up Strex speaketh crap. If your OS goes the software RAID5 remains in tact. You can also move the RAID5 from any PC/Controllor to any other PC/controllor and even reorder the disks and still get away with it. Been there done that...

SW Raid 5 is very robust as when I ran them I often replaced drives here and ther and moved them from PC to PC. Conversely they also tend to start rebuilding everytime you inadvertantly hit the rest button where as HW raid 5's tend to only rebuild when they detect an actual failed write or data mismatch.

With SW RAID you'll get about 50MB/s Download speed and awesome upload speeds until your memory is full (Windows actually caches SWR5 writes excellently) then it will crawl to 7MB/s write speed once memory is full. they chew about 20 to 25 percent of CPU during intensive writes.

If you can save your bickies for a Highpoint 1820A Rocket Raid for a mere $340 and you'll see 100MB/s Reads and 50MB/S writes or if you have an extra $120 and a PCI-e 4x slot, grab a Rocket Raid 2320 instead. Both of these puppies support 8 drives each.

First up Strex speaketh crap. If your OS goes the software RAID5 remains in tact. You can also move the RAID5 from any PC/Controllor to any other PC/controllor and even reorder the disks and still get away with it. Been there done that...

Is this the case with OS-type RAID software such as the inbuilt Windows 2000/XP or a Linux based RAID?

I just can't imagine that a Windows build software RAID is accessible via Linux and vice versa.. albeit I have yet to test it out.

Why on earth would any home user want RAID.

Always apply the KISS rule to home PCs. Keep It Simple Stupid.

Raid 5 is not a performance boost.
RAID 0 isn't even RAID and lose 1 drive and you lose the lot. Is the tiny bit of extra load speedworth it ?
RAID 0+1 ... so wasteful unless both redundancy and speed are of super importance.

Also avoid software raid. Performance sucks and its not future proof.

I am assuming its a pure laziness issue and wanting to install everything on C drive ?

I am assuming its a pure laziness issue and wanting to install everything on C drive ?

I'm not after performance, I'm not lazy about c: drive (it's more a L: drive thing =)), I want a large drive for tv stuff so I don't have to seperate it over a few drives.

That looks like a good card C0deBasher, but what sort of performance loss would it be looking at running in a normal PCI slot ?

I can see the value in having a RAID at home depending on your needs .. and with the cost of HDD's these days it's becoming quite practical to configure one.

For example, my old man is a Flight Sim nut - to the point of buying massive rear projection TVs & LCD screens so he can experience the game, as opposed to spending that money on a pilots license and flying for real. But anyway Flight Sim is fairly HDD intensive when loading detailed scenery from the expansion packs. Sometimes taking over 5 minutes and even upto 10 to load some of the highly populated areas of the map such as London. This is even with SATA drives, high quality PC, etc.

So obviously we need faster disk I/O and the solution was a RAID0 as redundancy isn't that much of a high priority for him. It's just one example where home users would want the benefits of a RAID.

With the increase in people tinkering in home movies, cutting & slicing clips, producing DVDs, etc.. it's inevitable we'll start to see PCs coming pre-shipped with RAIDs configured just for the simple fact that we need faster and faster disk I/O - not for the redundancy factor.

I'm not after performance, I'm not lazy about c: drive (it's more a L: drive thing =)), I want a large drive for tv stuff so I don't have to seperate it over a few drives./quote>

If you had a spare PC for this, use Linux. God knows why MS went for the lettering system when the structure of the Unix filesystems back in the day where alot smarter and future-proof.

I tried a software raid card a long time ago... never again. /me hugs my two 3ware cards :)

Ticman ... buying more ram and a better video card will do more then the tiny performance boost from sata to raid 0. And if you are truely that serious about it ie. spending thousands on projectors and cockpits you want ultra 160 drives and a hardware controller (and they aren't that expensive anyways if its that important).

Movies aren't required or particularly good for raid.

Sums it up pretty well

To summarize, RAID 0 offers generally minimal performance gains, significantly increased risk of data loss, and greater cost. That said, it offers the ability to have one large partition using the combined space of your identical drives, and there are situations where the benefit of the benefits outweight the disadvantages. It is your computer: The choice is up to you.

Personally DIVX storage is not one of them.
Break them up into categories and put em on seperate drives.
eg. TV Shows (mini series), TV Shows (series), Documentries, Music, Drama, Horror, Commedy, Chick Flick. Hell buy a DVD burner and burner the stuff you probably won't watch again out to DVD (most of it).
Or be realistic and admit the only reason for have 1000 gig of movies on HDD ready and raring to go is e-penis. Then that way you can buy fluros and and water cooling for your PC and won't feel bad.
And remember if 1 HDD stuffs up, more then likely you will have lost them all and your e-penis will be compeltely flacid.

Another link to maybe help you make an informed choice.

last edited by Obes at 13:07:15 21/Feb/06

Thanks for the links Obes, I was actually about to start a job in a next couple of weeks for a woman that has a central PC with a 65Mb MYOB file (well currently 65Mb and growing) the needs to be similtaniously read and written to by a number of PC's over a network... it's currently running off a PII 300 and obviously chugging, I'm going to replace the box completely and was going to include 2x WD 150Gb Raptors in Raid0 but after reading those articles I may think twice about that :) .... I've only ever really had experience in Raid5 to date so it's handy to read stuff like that.

Never put anything important on Raid0. Raid0 isn't even Raid infact its more like anti raid... you are increasing points of failure, instead of providing redundancy.

last edited by Obes at 13:42:35 21/Feb/06

Never put anything important on Raid0. Raid0 isn't even Raid infact its more like anti raid... you are increasing points of failure, instead of providing redundancy.

Yeah, I understood that... though in this situation the data is important my reasoning for choosing it was purely speed based considering i'd be setting it up to do automated daily backups so the worst the could loose would be upto 1 days data, ultimately I would like to stick them on raid5 but I don't think they're willing to fork out the dosh yet to do it properly. But yeah, sounds like 1 drive will be the way to go atm.

Ticman ... buying more ram and a better video card will do more then the tiny performance boost from sata to raid 0

Well thats the point, everything in the machine was top notch and the limiting factor was disk I/O which as rectified with a better configuration.

Is this the case with OS-type RAID software such as the inbuilt Windows 2000/XP or a Linux based RAID? I just can't imagine that a Windows build software RAID is accessible via Linux and vice versa.. albeit I have yet to test it out.

Windows SW Raid for Windows only I suspect. I can't imagine any other OS knowing what to do with it.

Why on earth would any home user want RAID.

Beats trying to backup all one's favourite TV shows to DVD. /me hugs my 2TB partition.

Raid 5 is not a performance boost.

My secondary raid has 4 x 250 (Raid 5) on a SX4-M of which 45GB is a boot/windows partition. C Drive txfer speeds are now 115MB sec and latency is < 1ms, I've just placed C-Drive on this particular RAID and the difference over my old single 250 is amazing.


last edited by C0deBasher at 14:37:50 21/Feb/06

Obes, please die. I do split the drives into categories, but I don't have enough to get much further than category 1/2/3. It's not just juarez I'm whoring, which is also why I'd like some redundancy. And I don't really care about performance.

If you had a spare PC for this, use Linux. God knows why MS went for the lettering system when the structure of the Unix filesystems back in the day where alot smarter and future-proof.

Yeah, I've actually been looking at getting an older box and doing this.

last edited by eXemplar at 15:16:41 21/Feb/06

1000 gig of legit linux ISOs .... lawl ...

ps. raid 0 provides no backup (opposite actually)

So its Raid 0+1 which means you lose half your space.

or its raid 5 (have fun software wise there ps. get hardware) and you lose 1/n th of your space where n is the number of drives you have). eg. 2 drives you lose 50%, 4 drives you lose 25%.

And if you can't break it down any more... you must have what several hundred or more files per directory ? ... the slaw of looking through directories like that

Copy all your files on to 2 of your 250Gb HDD, and give them to me, I'll provide an off-site backup storage for you :)

last edited by Opec at 18:37:05 21/Feb/06