Newbie setting up RAID-0, need tips etc :)

cokker

cokker

cokker

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Hi, im new to all the RAID side of hard drives :p , now i know most of the ins and outs of setting up a RAID array but id like to clear a few things up,

1. When connecting the cables to the mobo and HDD's am i using both IDE channels, eg Primary master and Secondary master?

2. Can i connect a DVD-Rom drive to one of the IDE cables as a slave?

3. Is there anything else i should know thats important?

System specs:-

Abit VT7 mobo
2x IDE fujitsu HDD's

If you need anymore info please ask

Many thanks for your help! :D
 
Usually the raid controller sits on one IDE channel and controls both master and slave. You would need to have both drives on the same cable USUALLY. Im sure there are some setups that are fine regardless but far as im aware generally 2xdrives on one IDE controller.
 
Just checking but is this the motherboard you have? Because if so I see no mention of IDE Raid, in fact it doesn't even appear to have enough IDE ports to support Raid, every time I have set-up Raid with IDE devices there has been separate Raid controllers on the motherboard and you would connect the hard drives to them. i.e. there were at least 4 IDE ports, 2 specifically for Raid.

No I don't think that you can connect optical drives onto a Raid set-up.
 
Yes thats the motherboard, i can setup a SATA RAID-0 or 1 but im a little skint to get SATA HDD's, i might try a windows raid setup on one IDE cable and see how that goes, im getting a rather pap 25mb/s transfer rate with one HDD so anything over 35mb/s would be helpful.

If it dont work in anyway would installing say NFS:MW on the second HDD improve performance?

Soz!
 
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That Raid card would work but I'm afraid you can't go linking to auction sites, Raiding your system may help but how well NFS:MW will perform depends on a few other things such as CPU and graphics card as well.

How old are the hard drives and are they set-up in DMA mode or PIO(you can find out in Windows hardware), you want them to be in DMA.
 
Hi sorry about that, i have a really crap geforce2 at the mo but on low settings im getting a good 40fps, the HDD's are 20gig fujitsu's about year 99'ish. Il check the DMA settings in a mo but i think there at max.

My CPU is a intel celeron 330 D (2.6ghz) running at 3.34ghz and one 512mb stick of Geil DDR400
 
Application - Video processing / audio processing / games / general use (word processor / web browsing).

Stripe size - a setting which you choose when setting up the array. The size you choose will be very important to the performance of the system. You would choose it based on the files you want to benefit from the increased transfer speeds. If you choose a size which is too big, then any files smaller than this will not be written to multiple drives, so it will be as if you are just using one drive. Too small and everything will be split up so much, the CPU overhead will limit the transfer speeds.

Cluster size - not quite so important - this is a setting which specifies the smallest storage unit on a drive. e.g. NTFS default for most drive sizes is 4kB. If you write a file which is only 1kB to the drive, it will actually take up 4kB because that is the smallest unit. ROUGHLY speaking - smaller = more efficient use of space, larger = higher performance.


You would want to set the stripe size to about 1/2 the size of the average (or median, really) file on the system.

You would probably want to set the cluster size to about 1/2 the stripe size, but I don't think this is quite so important.

Typical values would be a 32k stripe with an 8kB cluster.
 
Hi, thanks for the explanation, i got my second HDD from ebay-ahem lasted all of 6 hours then went pop (more click click werr crunch).

So for the time being RAID is off the menu, il see about getting a pair of matching SATA HDD's at a later date.

Thanks again.
 
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