PATA Raid

[MrRatt]

Hi,

I have 2x Maxtor 120 gig drives. and 1 DVDRW and 1 CDRW
The second Maxtor was my backup drive, but i have just baught a new 250gb Freecom USB External drive, so the second maxtor is just sitting there blank.
currently they are set up like this...

Channel 1
Master - Maxtor #1
Slave - Maxtor #2

Channel 2
Master - DVDRW
Slave - CDRW

i would like to set up a RAID on the 2 maxtors, i think a RAID 0 (Striping?)

I understand that this would store the data on both drives and read from both drives to speed up programs and applications. is that correct?

my second question is.

would i benifit from putting both the hard drives as masters on 2 diffrent channels?
eg.

Channel 1
Master - Maxtor #1
Slave - DVDRW

Channel 2
Master - Maxtor #2
Slave - CDRW

Hope someone can help.

Regards

Matt

[MrRatt]

i use the DVDRW the most...

but if the drives are in a raid0 wouldnt that make the maxtor #2 get used as much as the maxtor #1?

or do i need to read more on raid...?

[Foggy]

Just looking at the current setup it doesn"t look like your board is raid ready, by that I mean you should have 4 IDE channels with 2 raid specific or a raid card, just the act of creating a raid array will wipe out your disks also most arrays need the disks to be set to master.

After thought, If you have an extra HDD that will hold your current setup you could ghost it to the extra drive, then setup the raid and ghost the backup to the raid array, assuming the current setup is in good shape.

[MrRatt]

hi,

My board is ready, A8N-SLi
it has a Silicon 3114 SATA Raid & NRAID (PATA & SATA)

ive just finished setting up the array, it is all working ok.

1 question, in a RAID 0 setup, is it supposed to combine the drives? at the moment i have 288gb. i thought that JBOD done that.

I thought that RAID 0 wrote to both and read from both drives.

[DanU]

Both RAID0 and JBOD will result in a logical drive with a capacity that is the sum of the component drives. The difference is in how they do it. RAID0 will "stripe" the data across all the disks so it reads and writes simultaneously to all disks. On a two drive array this will theoretically double the read/write performance.

JBOD "spans" the disks. Think of it as performing a concatenation of the drives. You will only read/write to one drive at a time.

[MrRatt]

ahhh excellent
understand now.

thanks for the help.