2 Late for RAID?

Kev_19

Kev_19

Kev_19

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I recently built my 1st pc.


I only bought 1 Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB and I am beginning to wonder should I have gone with a raid set up instead.
My question is is it 2 late to do this now that I have my pc fully up and running? Or can I still set up Raid on it?
 
You can still set it up, but if it's raid 0 you have in mind you'll have to reinstall your operating system and copy all your data back on from backup.
You'll double your hard drive speed and double the chances of mechanical failure.

Raid 1 can be done without needing to reinstall the operating system, but it's still wise to back things up first.

Definitely worth doing raid 0 if you keep backups. Probably not worth doing if you don't.
 
ok, will it have to be an identical had drive to the 1 I have in or could I put in any other hard drive??
 
If you match it to a samsung 750 say, you'll just waste 90mb. That would also be pairing a 2 platter to a 3 platter drive, which will probably be fine but might give rise to some interesting effects.

It'll work whatever you match it to. A 32gb 2.5" laptop drive can be raided with it, to give you a 64gb terribly performing mess.
I recommend matching the drives however, it'll just be easier. Which one did you have in mind as an alternative?

And are you looking at raid 0 or raid 1?
 
Yep generally you want the same drive (a different drive will work, you might end up with odd performance issues due to differing transfer rates and response times).
 
Different drives, as long as same capacity/speed, are actually better though (more for RAID 1 or RAID 5/6 than RAID 0 though) because different manufacturers drives are more likely to fail at different times when placed under the same/very similar load, such as in a RAID setup. You wouldn't want your RAID 1 or RAID5 setup going along happily, then two drives failing at once because they were the same manufacturer and had the same lifespan!
 
miniyazz said:
Different drives, as long as same capacity/speed, are actually better though (more for RAID 1 or RAID 5/6 than RAID 0 though) because different manufacturers drives are more likely to fail at different times when placed under the same/very similar load, such as in a RAID setup. You wouldn't want your RAID 1 or RAID5 setup going along happily, then two drives failing at once because they were the same manufacturer and had the same lifespan!
Click to expand...

So you are saying to match my existing WD 640gb 7200rpm with another 7200rpm drive? The problems only arise when I have differences between drive speed and size?
 
i am asumeing that you are wanting to use RAID 0 ? the WD black drive it self is Quite fast it self and realy depends if you want to go down the route of reloading windows or not

it should not have problems, but still recommend Buying the same drive (and as its an WD Black i Very recommend you buy that same drive again for performance reasons), as with raid 0 does not matter witch drive fails the whole array will fail at that point and all data will be lost (miniyazz) RAID 1 it still not matter as well as it be redundant

but you most likely need to reload windows Unless you Picked RAID mode when you installed windows (disks do not need to be in raid mode Just the Option in the Bios needs to be set to that mode then you could ghost the HDD to an other disk make raid and restore the Ghost img to the new raid)
 
I am looking to to use RAID 0. I am just disappointed with the speed of the WD Black on its own, was expecting it to be faster tbh. Takes about 2-3 minutes for my PC to boot up.
 
I will have to reload Windows back up as I didnt have RAID mode picked when I 1st installed. Can I just back up everything that I have installed and just reinstall it when I have the RAID 0 set up? I dont mind having to reinstall everything from scratch but if there is a way of backing up it would be great. Dont fancy spending another 3 days updating all my drivers, windows service packs etc.

Excuse my ignorance as my experience is limited!
 
you have to install programs and updates again, back up data, should not take 3 days (slow internet ? download SP1 and SP2 for vista Before connecting to the Internet make sure they are both on, as that does Most of the updates you only need to do 5 updates then after SP2 is installed)

with the amount of ram you have got in that PC i recommend turning off superfetch (using vista ?) as it can have an poor affect on the HDD some times, my case was when Transcodeing and burning using windows dvd maker as it made an 5 min burn turn into an 15 min burn (buffer under running) superfetch thought it was an good time to start filling up the ram when i was burning the disk at the same time in turn my data rate dropped so slow it could not burn at full speed (Vista's superfetch has no File I/O prioty built into it so does not care if your using the HDD at that time, windows 7 i think is better but as i have got an SSD its auto off)

useing RAID 0 does hide some of the problems with vista due to that the 2 disks has 128KB per block so can read more data per read as long as the file is bigger then 128kb and most programs are, the best fix for Vista is an SSD with cache (corsair or samsung for no fuss, maybe OCZ if you wish to play with them) basicly high speed low drag (the drag been the Aceess time that most HDDs are around 12-20ms where as SSD is more like 1ms< so everty thing happens Right away data rate is not so important with SSDs), Vista does a lot of random reads and writes and is why a lot of HDDs drown under them
 
Yes I am running Vista. I mainly use the pc for gaming and buring DVDs. I hope to move to Windows 7 in the near future but am unable to do so as some of the anti cheat software used by some of the games is incompatible with Windows 7. 3 days may have been a bit of an exaggeration for downloading, but easily a day and a half in downloading updates and patches for all the software that I have. I wasnt smart to save the updates the 1st time round!

Superfetch is counterproductive when running Vista?
 
If you can borrow a big hdd from a friend you could just make an image of the hdd, then reload it onto the raid array using some for of boot cd or linux live cd, save reinstalling, just leave it overnight to copy
 
It just has to have enough free space on it to make an image of your current OS drive (the used space, not the free space).
With RAID0 having two drives failing at once really isn't an issue, either way the array goes down, so you may as well have the same drive.
2-3 minutes is quite a long time to boot. Are you including POST time (before the OS screen starts)? You might have tons of stuff loading up at startup, or you might have a dodgy hard drive..
 
Ok I just timed the startup. Not including POST time it took 1min 30sec. That just seems slow tbh to me.

Is there a specific program that will allow me to take an image of my current OS drive?
 
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Yeah, Google for 'ghost'. I use dd, but then I don't use windows. There's several options out for windows. Be aware that you're going to need to install the raid drivers first, or it just wont boot. It'll be a lot simpler to do everything from scratch, but if you want to ghost it you can do.
Before saving the image to the external drive, make sure it is not formatted as fat32, or it wont work. Reformat to ntfs if required.

I also vote for getting the same drive if using raid 0.
 
Kev_19 said:
Takes about 2-3 minutes for my PC to boot up.
Click to expand...
Most of slow boot problems are software problems.
Lot of "includes kitchen sink" shovelware and other such crap... not forgetting bloated software/OS.
(system tray full of stuff?)
 
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