Rookie RAID questions?

neodave · May 21st, 2002, 08:31 PM

I have the Soyo K7V Dragon+ motherboard and was wondering if it would be worth the trouble to set up my system in RAID. I also have several 7200 HDDs of various sizes.

Questions:

1. Since my board is RAID ready I don't need a PCI controller?

2. If your using 2 40gig drives...do you have 80gigs of storage or 40gig? Four 20gigs would equal 40gigs of actual storage?

3. How many of you use RAID on your Personal PC? Why? What type of RAID set-up?

I'd appreciate your opinion on RAID.

vass0922 · May 21st, 2002, 08:53 PM

1. Why wouldn't you need a PCI controller?

2. it depends on what kind of RAID you go for. If you go for RAID 0 (striping only) then yes you'll get 80 gigs out of it. If you go RAID1 (mirror) then you'll only get 40 gigs.. I don't think too many home PC controllers allow for RAID5 so I won't bother. I would doubt you'd go with RAID 1 (or for that matter RAID 1+0) unless you have something mission critical on your machine where you'll literally duplicate every bit of data onto both disks (in case you lose one, the controller will fail over to teh 2nd disk). Most will use RAID0 because it allows you to "stripe" data across both disks allowing you to read and write from two disks at the same time which gives it its speed. Now I've heard on a standard home PC it doesn't help much, but I've heard some say it does... depends on what you use it for.
3. I don't

We use either RAID1 or RAID5 here at work on all servers though.

neodave · May 21st, 2002, 09:00 PM

See...told you I'm a rookie. Just thought since there are two additional RAID IDE ports on the MB that a PCI card wouldn't be necessary.

Thanks for the reply Vass

I was curious about the how the actual storage worked. Raid-0 sounds like the way to go. Nothing I do a home is mission critical.

neodave · May 21st, 2002, 09:27 PM

I guess ultimately I want to add another hard drive for more space. But figured since I have a RAID board and may see some performance improvements...why not use it.

I would like to use my 60gig 7200 IBM and my 40gig 7200 WD. Any potential problems using those in RAID-0? (No IBM jokes please. She's been good to me thus far) I wasn't sure if the different sizes or manufacturers would cause a problem.

Detritus · May 21st, 2002, 09:52 PM

Wait... the soyo website says the board has onboard RAID. If that is true then you don't need a PCI card. To get full use of both drives you should use 2 drives that are the same size and in my opinion to have the set-up as stable as can be the same manufacturer. Just remeber that a RAID 0 array has a higher failure rate then just one drive (2 drives twice the failure rate) and if a drive fails you loose everything. You probably aren't interested in a RAID 1 (mirroring) setup unless you have serious data you need to back up.

Scott Tiger · May 21st, 2002, 09:54 PM

I was under the impression that if you want RAID to work well when stripping you should use to identical drives for best performance. Not that I'm saying this is true Neodave. This is just what I've heard and I'm asking the group if it's true... I'm as much a rookie as you are. If you do get it setup let me know how you like it. I've got a couple 40's that I'd love to stripe right now but haven't taken the plunge yet.

ST

neodave · May 21st, 2002, 09:59 PM

Well I figured with a 3 day or possibly 4 day weekend coming up I'd give it a shot. I'm just trying to weigh the benefits of setting it up in RAID versus simply adding a hard disk as slave on a regular IDE port.

Any more opinions?

Scott Tiger · May 21st, 2002, 10:15 PM

What OS (and filesystem) will be using? I ordered the $50 copy of WinXP from MS and will be using NTFS.

ST

PresterJohn · May 21st, 2002, 10:19 PM

i would only run raid (stripe or mirror) if you store data on your drives that is irreplaceable and needs to be always availabe with a minimum of downtime. even then, regular backups are the only reliable line of defense against drive failure, pc theft, or fire/damage.

generally the most common use of onboard raid in non-server configuarations is that it adds another 2 ide channels to the machine. my suggestion would be to just use them in this manner, ie. if you want to add more than 2 ide drives to the pc or splitting your drives (if you have them daisy chained on one channel).

neodave · May 21st, 2002, 10:28 PM

PresterJohn..... I don't like to sound ignorant, but I thought the RAID IDE channels had to be used in a RAID set-up. Are you saying to simply treat them as another IDE port for a HDD? I wonder if I'd have to jack with the bios setting to get that to work?