Following on from my dead PC thread I have been given another mainboard which has RAID. In my current PC I have a matched pair of 160's so what if anything can this RAID malarky do for a mere mortal like myself? Can it improve performance?

Depends on the raid configuration tbh mate. What it does in principle is mirror the data from one drive onto another [in it's most basic form] thus offering data redundancy. So inpractice you will be losing data storage.

Quick link of Raid Technologies: http://www.ahinc.com/raid.htm

The manual says RAID 1 or 0.

Looking at that guide, RAID 0 should increase disk speed by 25%.

I normally like to run with partitions, so could I say have both drives partitioned with a split of say 120/40gb and raid just the 120gb partition?

Really depends on the software drivers you have for the RAID system. Did you get the manual for the motherboard? Might be worth a google for the model number to see if there is anything listed in the manual

Raid 0 can increase disk speed Stu as it's reading / writing to 2 seperate disks simultaniously (or near as damnit)

With 0, if you lose one disk through failure you do lose all your data as there is no fault tolerance.

I use it on my home PC, only because it's there, I had the drives and since doing it there is a measurable increas in disk performance, 25% is optomistic, mine from benchmarking came out arounf 17% faster.

You will need the RAID driver on floppy during the install of XP, you will need to hit the F6 key when it tells you to in big feck off white lettering to specify a different mass storage controller, then your striped drives appear as one volume to XP.

It's not difficult to setup m8

Thanks mate, looks like I might have a go of this - Assuming I get the fecker working again.

I normally like to run with partitions' date=' so could I say have both drives partitioned with a split of say 120/40gb and raid just the 120gb partition?[/quote']

You could do this through XP, you can raid it in software but you have to convert the disks to dynamic disks first of all, which I don't like as I have had problems recovering from failure of dynamic disks in the past.

In disk administrator (from comp management)

Convert to dynamic > Select the free space on both volumes > Create Striped Volume.

Bob is then your aunties husband

If you want to understand RAID, see the attached....

Phil

If you want to understand RAID' date=' see the attached....

Phil[/quote']

Was waiting for that one

Quality

was that cluster a dual node active active or active passive, can't quite make it out.

Col, got the CD yet?

It took a while but I thought that would make an appearance

Forget using RAID 0 if you value your data. Since the data is written in stripes across both disks if one disk dies or has a problem you have lost the data on both drives.

RAID 1 is not too bad as mirroring is always nice, however you have to consider that sometimes the RAID chips do 'clever' things to optimise the data storage. This could mean that if you loose the mobo, your data might be unreadable on another RAID controller.

All the fun hey

It just fell at the first hurdle. I don't have a floppy disk drive.

Bugger!!

I decided that as I only have a small amount of 'valuable' data, I'd install a 10gb slave drive off of normal IDE to backup to.

dvd+r-dl holds almost 9 stu

I only have single layer.

I have an abundance of ex-Xbox drives so a 10gb would provide ready access.

You could do this through XP, you can raid it in software

Nooo, software RAID is not nice!

Nooo, software RAID is not nice!

I did not recommend it, I just said it was possible.

Software RAID is fine if it's used appropriately. I.e. an older PC or something which has a reasonable CPU combined with a bunch of HDDs for storage is fine. Hardware RAID is generally much better, although there are some Raid5 implementations that are done in software even with a dedicated controller.

RAID5 is getting more affordable though

We are getting carried away, Stu is only (no offence) rebuilding his own personal desktop PC

We are getting carried away, Stu is only (no offence) rebuilding his own personal desktop PC

Not-at-all lol... everyone needs a fibre-channel SAN in their home

or a XP12000 disc array... bullet-proof donchaknow

Is this a bad time to mention I've got a dual core, dual CPU Opteron with 2x75G Raptors in Raid1 + 1 400G hotspare RE drive and 3x400GB in RAID5 (yep that IS at home )

Slightly more realistically, a little mirroring at home is fine.

Most important with the kinda temperatures etc we get at the moment is to keep the airflow in the case good past drives etc.

Nice power and hardware bill you got there.

Is that not a little expensive and noisey with all the air you will need to force across that lot to keep them down in temp.

Stu, if you want a floppy drive, I may well be able to help you out by sending you a spare one?

Thanks Richard but I bought one yesterday.

I think RAIDs are great, aren't they, Col? (sorry, don't mean to rub it in!)