What's with RAID?

[hackman2007]

Can someone please explain to me how to get RAID set up? I know the basics about it, as in you need at least 2 hard drives (I think they might have to be the same too). I've looked at a ton of guides each describing the differences between RAID levels, but I've never seen any guide that explains HOW to set it up. So can someone explain this to me? Or is this too simple of a question and shouldn't be asked?

[jph1589]

It is a breeze. I assume you want Raid 0 ?

FIrst you will need to download the F6 driver files from MSI's website for your motherboard. Copy those files to a floppy disk. Then you will need to re-install windows.
I suppose I should have said that first in case you wanted to stop. Assumeing you are still reading the next step is to set up your bios for raid.

In your bios, there will be an option to activate raid and an option to activate it for each drive you are using. Pretty straight forward. When you save and reboot it will show an additional screen after the post screen that will tell you to hit some key to get into the raid setup screen. There you can set your drives up for Raid 0 or 1 or whatever your controller allows and it will let you tell it how much space to use. Use the entire drives unless you are going to use Intel Matrix. That is another whole story.

Now it will create the raid volume and then let you exit. Have your XP home cd in the cd drive and make sure your system is set up to boot from the cd. It will ask you very early on if you want to load addition drivers and to hit F6 if you do. Hit F6 and it will continue on the install. In a little while it will tell you it needs the drivers to read your disk volume and that you should insert them into your floppy. There will probably be two. You need to load them both ...one at a time.

This will let the install communicate with the Raid volume and it will also build those drivers into your windows installation. Everything after this is pretty much the same as normal. Load the chipset drivers....etc.

I'll be around if you have any more questions.

[hackman2007]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm not planning on setting this up tonight. It was just a question on how to do this in case I wanted to do it sometime in the future.

I do have one more question though. Do each of the drives have to be same spec, as in SLI or can they be different. As in can I use a 200GB Maxtor and 20GB Seagate hard drive (both are PATA).

[jph1589]

Originally Posted by hackman2007

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm not planning on setting this up tonight. It was just a question on how to do this in case I wanted to do it sometime in the future.

I do have one more question though. Do each of the drives have to be same spec, as in SLI or can they be different. As in can I use a 200GB Maxtor and 20GB Seagate hard drive (both are PATA).

I'm pretty sure If you use a 20gb and a 200gb that your Raid volume will be the size of the smalles drive and the rest may be wasted space. There may be some way to recover that with Intel Matrix, if your have an ICH7R or ICH8R. But I'm not sure. I think there is a thread on here about matrix raid if i remember correctly.

[Mythixus]

RAID level 0 (striping) is incredibly good for performance, but if one drive fails you can lose all your data.

If you are looking for reliability in your data, you might want to look at RAID level 1 (mirroring) or maybe some of the other levels that are possible.

[polobunny]

As jph said, lowest size controls your RAID size. Trust me though, RAID0 looks like fun but it isn't really useful. It's something you might find yourself doing once in a while in your whole computer guy life and then you'll think "Now I know why I swore not to do it again". :P
It's not a hassle or anything to manage, but it's not very useful either. You would have a hard time looking at 2 similar systems under Windows and point which one is running a RAID0 and which one isn't.

[jph1589]

Originally Posted by polobunny

As jph said, lowest size controls your RAID size. Trust me though, RAID0 looks like fun but it isn't really useful. It's something you might find yourself doing once in a while in your whole computer guy life and then you'll think "Now I know why I swore not to do it again". :P
It's not a hassle or anything to manage, but it's not very useful either. You would have a hard time looking at 2 similar systems under Windows and point which one is running a RAID0 and which one isn't.

As I am sure you knew I would, I respectfully disagree.

The biggest change I've ever made on my systems was to make the windows volume Raid 0. It makes a much more noticable speed increase than any overclock I've done if you look at it for day to day desktop use, browsing, etc. Just something simple, like how fast the icons fill a window is noticably faster. Not to mention the time decrease in rendering mpeg files when I'm recording and burning movies.


And then if you think it might all be in my imagination, you can look at my Hitachi 7K80 running in native sata / single disk for the Windows volume and test it with HDtach. The average read speed is about 50mbs. When to make a raid array on the same computer with the same disks, the average read speed is almost 100mbs.

So if it is all in my imagination, at least I have some pretty impressive benchmarks to back up my hallucinations.

As I used to tell my boss, nothing personal.....just business.

So, nothing person, just my opinion.:proud:

[Lead Head]

If you want speed, go with Raid 0 this needs 2 HDs minimum. The data is split half and half between the drives. So if you have two 100GB HDs, your space will be 200GB. If one drive fails, your data is gone. Period.


If you want reliability go Raid 1, This also needs 2 HDs minimum. But, the second HD is a perfect copy of the first drive. If you have two 100GB HDs, your available space is 100GB. If a drive fails, you have a back up to use.


If you want close to the performance of Raid 0 with Reliability of Raid 1, you can use Raid 0+1 (Raid10?). Two HDs are stripped(Raid0), then the other two HDs make a perfect copy of the first two. This can hinder performance a bit, depending on your RAID controller. Raid 0+1s storage space is like Raid 0s. If you have 4 100GB HDs, your total usable space is 200GB. This is probably the most expensive one to implement. Up to 2 drives can fail with this while still having a chance to recover data.

If you want good speed with reliability, then you would want Raid 5. This needs 3 HDs. I'm not entirely sure of how it works, but I believe this may be somewhat correct. Two HDs are stripped, and the data from the two stripped drives is backed up onto the 3rd drive. AFAIK, the 3rd drive, the backup drive's capacity has to be the sum of the stripped drives added together. I'm entirely sure on this though. With this, two drives can fail. Both stripped drives can fail, and you can still recover data from the array. But if the backup drive and a stripped drive fails, your data is basicly gone.


Another option is what is called a JBOD array. Lets say you have a 120GB HD, a 60GB , and a 30GB, all in one PC. If you were to put these drives on a JBOD array, they would appear to the computer as one giant drive. Instead of 3 individual drives, you would see one 210GB HD. Performance can vary depending on what kind of drives you use. Data recovery on this is a bit iffy, if a drive fails, you can usually extract data from the other drives without too much of a problem, unless the data for that particular file happend to be spanned across all the drives.


There are many more RAID modes that are significantly more fault tolerant then the ones I listed, but the amount of drives you need can get pricey, and they usually require expensive controller.


I know this is not really waht you asked for, but eh whatever.

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by jph1589

As I am sure you knew I would, I respectfully disagree.

The biggest change I've ever made on my systems was to make the windows volume Raid 0. It makes a much more noticable speed increase than any overclock I've done if you look at it for day to day desktop use, browsing, etc. Just something simple, like how fast the icons fill a window is noticably faster. Not to mention the time decrease in rendering mpeg files when I'm recording and burning movies.


And then if you think it might all be in my imagination, you can look at my Hitachi 7K80 running in native sata / single disk for the Windows volume and test it with HDtach. The average read speed is about 50mbs. When to make a raid array on the same computer with the same disks, the average read speed is almost 100mbs.

So if it is all in my imagination, at least I have some pretty impressive benchmarks to back up my hallucinations.

As I used to tell my boss, nothing personal.....just business.

So, nothing person, just my opinion.:proud:

I'm alright debating and whatnot, i'm not going to bicker or anything you know. ;D
Really though, in looks cool in benchmarks, not just in real life unless you're using your hard drives alot. As I mostly game, I see little to nothing. I'm currently running a RAID0 64k stripe of WD3200KS and sure, 320mb/s burst speed and 120mb/s sequential but it saves me like 2 seconds loading a game down the road. :P
It all really depends on your uses obviously.

[Hitman]

Originally Posted by polobunny

I'm alright debating and whatnot, i'm not going to bicker or anything you know. ;D
Really though, in looks cool in benchmarks, not just in real life unless you're using your hard drives alot. As I mostly game, I see little to nothing. I'm currently running a RAID0 64k stripe of WD3200KS and sure, 320mb/s burst speed and 120mb/s sequential but it saves me like 2 seconds loading a game down the road. :P
It all really depends on your uses obviously.

For a common user RAID 0 isn't very noticeable, and unless your using an expensive Professional RAID controller, your performance gains will be minimal. This same topic has been argued by people that make more money and have higher educations than any of us. I think it comes down to what you are using to benchmark the performance, and what hardware you are using. I gave up on RAID 0 over a year ago, I never saw anything the wowed me after using it for over 5 years.