I am gonna attempt this but i have a few questions. I've tried looking everywhere but can't find an answer. Is it possible to ahve windows on a stripped Raid 0 drive. i know windows has to be installed first. some places say it can't be on a stripped drive, but then others have benchmarks for comparing windows raid vs hardware raid on windows bootup times/ transfer rates. I think it was pcstats that had this benchmark and guide to software raid 0.
Can i have windows running on a software raid 0 drive. I plan and spanning 3 drives for 15 gigs total and more partitions for more space.
Windows XP software raid
-
FlyingPenguin
- Flightless Bird
- Posts: 33161
- Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
- Location: Central Florida
- Contact:
As far as I know you can't do SOFTWARE raid 0 at all except possibly in Server Edition. Even if you could there would also be no performance benefit, so why bother?
Hardware Raid is simple enough to implement - especially if you're planning on a clean install of Windows. Many mobos have built-in hardware Raid, and an add-on card doesn't cost much.
HOWEVER let me warn you that unless you have a specific need for Raid 0 (like video editing or certain kinds of games that do a lot of loading of large files during gameplay) it's not worth it for casual computing and gaming. You're also increasing the likelyhood of suffering data loss due to drive failure or corruption.
If this is for a file server, you're much better off accessing those drives as individual drive letters instead of one large array.
Hardware Raid is simple enough to implement - especially if you're planning on a clean install of Windows. Many mobos have built-in hardware Raid, and an add-on card doesn't cost much.
HOWEVER let me warn you that unless you have a specific need for Raid 0 (like video editing or certain kinds of games that do a lot of loading of large files during gameplay) it's not worth it for casual computing and gaming. You're also increasing the likelyhood of suffering data loss due to drive failure or corruption.
If this is for a file server, you're much better off accessing those drives as individual drive letters instead of one large array.
---
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
-
Executioner
- Life Member
- Posts: 10351
- Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:34 am
- Location: Woodland, CA USA
Not to crap on someone elses thread, but I have a spare rig in the garage that has dual P3-1GHz cpu's with 512 megs of ram.
Can someone explain the differences of each RAID setup, and the benifits of going RAID? Do the HD's have to be the same size or make? Which RAID level gives the best performance? Is the RAID setup done at the BIOS level before installing Windows? Are there any issues with Windows? Sorry but I'm a RAID newbie.
Can someone explain the differences of each RAID setup, and the benifits of going RAID? Do the HD's have to be the same size or make? Which RAID level gives the best performance? Is the RAID setup done at the BIOS level before installing Windows? Are there any issues with Windows? Sorry but I'm a RAID newbie.
there are something like 5 levels of RAID, the main ones are raid 0 and raid 1
raid 0 is called striping and will write data consecutively to the disks. theoretically it doubles the capacity and gets a faster read/write speed, but depending on what you are doing, some will say there is little or no improvement in performance. assuming the array is 2 disks, one can not function without the other. if one goes bad, you lose everything.
raid 1 is called mirroring and will write everything twice, 1 to each disk. in this case, if one goes bad, then you have a copy on the other disk.
most boards with raid chips will have raid 0, and raid 1. also raid 0 + 1 which it can stripe and mirror, and you would ideally have to have 4 disks to do 0+1.
if your board has a raid chip, then there will be special IDE or SATA ports on the board to plug the drives into. you can enable the RAID function in BIOS, and then there would be an extra screen after POST whre you would hit like f3 or something, then it would go to the utility where you can setup the array.
it is ideal but not required to use identical drives for something like this. if they are different sizes, then it will default to the smallest disk and you waste whatever extra space you had on the larger drive.
raid 0 is called striping and will write data consecutively to the disks. theoretically it doubles the capacity and gets a faster read/write speed, but depending on what you are doing, some will say there is little or no improvement in performance. assuming the array is 2 disks, one can not function without the other. if one goes bad, you lose everything.
raid 1 is called mirroring and will write everything twice, 1 to each disk. in this case, if one goes bad, then you have a copy on the other disk.
most boards with raid chips will have raid 0, and raid 1. also raid 0 + 1 which it can stripe and mirror, and you would ideally have to have 4 disks to do 0+1.
if your board has a raid chip, then there will be special IDE or SATA ports on the board to plug the drives into. you can enable the RAID function in BIOS, and then there would be an extra screen after POST whre you would hit like f3 or something, then it would go to the utility where you can setup the array.
it is ideal but not required to use identical drives for something like this. if they are different sizes, then it will default to the smallest disk and you waste whatever extra space you had on the larger drive.
-
FlyingPenguin
- Flightless Bird
- Posts: 33161
- Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
- Location: Central Florida
- Contact:
Well to clarify, Raid 0 doesn't DOUBLE capacity. You have two 200Gb drives you have 400Gb of space whether you use the drives seperately of in a Raid 0 array.
The only benefit to Raid 0 is increased performance IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS. Generally you'll see slighly faster load times (although nowhere near double of a single drive) and better throughput when accessing large files. Up until 10K RPM drives RAID 0 was attractive for video editing, but frankly I wouldn't even use it for that anymore.
Raid 0 has many drawbacks. The worst of which is that you now DOUBLE the probablilty of data loss due to drive failure. There is no redundancy in RAID 0 - corrupt either drive and you lose it ALL.
RAID is best implemented in hardware - either onboard RAID (many mobos have this) or you can buy an add-on card. The drives connect to the RAID controller and then you setup the array in BIOS. As far as BIOS, Windows or any OS is concerned your array appears as ONE drive.
The drives don't have to be the same size, although any overage space on the larger drive is wasted (if you use a 200 and a 250Gb drive you'll have a 400Gb array wasting 50Gb on the bigger drive).
The drives should IDEALLY be the same size and (more important) same performance specs otherwise your array is as slow as the slowest drive.
In my opinion, right now with current drive technology, RAID 0 is not worth it.
Now that rig you have in the garage sounds like it would make a dandy file server. If you're worried about losing data then you could set it up with RAID 1 (mirroring). Failure of either drive would cause no loss of data, although you need to commit 2 drives and get half the storage (two 200 Gb drives in a Raid 1 array gives you a 200Gb array).
Raid 1 is used in office servers for disaster recovery in case of drive failure. However Raid 1 is worthless without some monitoring utility to tell you the array is broken. There is no way to tell from within Windows if one drive in a mirror array has failed unless you have a proprietary utility. Promise RAID controllers, for instance, come with a utility called FastCheck that does this - it sounds an alarm if the array is broken. It's then up to you to swap out the bad drive. While the array is broken you have no redundancy.
Raid 1 is NO REPLACEMENT for making scheduled backups of important data (something that's hard to get across to customers sometimes). Data can become corrupted (and the array will just mirror the corruption).
The only benefit to Raid 0 is increased performance IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS. Generally you'll see slighly faster load times (although nowhere near double of a single drive) and better throughput when accessing large files. Up until 10K RPM drives RAID 0 was attractive for video editing, but frankly I wouldn't even use it for that anymore.
Raid 0 has many drawbacks. The worst of which is that you now DOUBLE the probablilty of data loss due to drive failure. There is no redundancy in RAID 0 - corrupt either drive and you lose it ALL.
RAID is best implemented in hardware - either onboard RAID (many mobos have this) or you can buy an add-on card. The drives connect to the RAID controller and then you setup the array in BIOS. As far as BIOS, Windows or any OS is concerned your array appears as ONE drive.
The drives don't have to be the same size, although any overage space on the larger drive is wasted (if you use a 200 and a 250Gb drive you'll have a 400Gb array wasting 50Gb on the bigger drive).
The drives should IDEALLY be the same size and (more important) same performance specs otherwise your array is as slow as the slowest drive.
In my opinion, right now with current drive technology, RAID 0 is not worth it.
Now that rig you have in the garage sounds like it would make a dandy file server. If you're worried about losing data then you could set it up with RAID 1 (mirroring). Failure of either drive would cause no loss of data, although you need to commit 2 drives and get half the storage (two 200 Gb drives in a Raid 1 array gives you a 200Gb array).
Raid 1 is used in office servers for disaster recovery in case of drive failure. However Raid 1 is worthless without some monitoring utility to tell you the array is broken. There is no way to tell from within Windows if one drive in a mirror array has failed unless you have a proprietary utility. Promise RAID controllers, for instance, come with a utility called FastCheck that does this - it sounds an alarm if the array is broken. It's then up to you to swap out the bad drive. While the array is broken you have no redundancy.
Raid 1 is NO REPLACEMENT for making scheduled backups of important data (something that's hard to get across to customers sometimes). Data can become corrupted (and the array will just mirror the corruption).
---
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
-
Executioner
- Life Member
- Posts: 10351
- Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:34 am
- Location: Woodland, CA USA
Thanks FP for the info. The mobo has a RAID controller built on the mobo, and before it loads windows, it does a check to see if a RAID setup is detected. I was looking at RAID 0 since I deal with large video files of ~4 gigs in size. These are movies that I get from newsgroups. I don't do any video editing though, only downloading all the parts of the file, so after reading your comments, sounds like RAID 0 will not really do anything for me in performance. The rig is not critical to me in any way, so if it did not startup one morning, it would not matter one bit.