Quick Raid Question

PaulyD

PaulyD

PaulyD

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Just ordered a Seagate 500Gb 7200.11 hdd 32mb cache, am wanting to raid this with a western digital 500gb hdd - not sure on cache size off hand.

To my understanding, its only the space that matters when it comes to raiding? and the best for capacity and read time is raid0?
 
You ideally Raid0 2 identical HDD's.

You can Raid any size together simply means you get 2x the smaller sized HDD, ie 500GB+250GB would give you 500GB.
 
your array will work fine, your will get roughly the same size drive as if you used a single 1TB drive, but around twice the read and write speeds of a single drive, with the access time remaining the same. RAID 0 (striping) is for speed and capacity, RAID 1 (mirroring) for some speed (depending on the implimentation) and redundancy.

The cache size that you mention will really only effect read and write speed, so it is likely that a drive with more cache will have slightly higher 'burst rates' than one with lower cache, however this is of little concequence, and is not always true.
 
Thanks - I would have thought that the cache would not really matter much for this.

Anyway the drive has arrived :) and is now in - just gonna format and reinstall with the raid driver. Reinstalling with 64bit as i just got another 2gig of ram to make 4gig

Thanks for the helpful reply
 
There is a really interesting article of why it is not worthwhile upgrading to 64bit when you 'only' have 4Gb ram on Toms Hardware. It explains that although a 32 bit operating system can only address a maximum of 4 GB, and then some of that is reserved for video etc, it is better to stick with 32 bit, as you waste more than 512 Mb of ram by using 64bit addresses, or something.

However, when I got 4GB I moved to 64 bit too, have 8GB now, and there is little difference.
 
Raid0 is not TWICE as fast, the Old Rule Of Thumb was about 60%, its a bit faster now as drives are better possibly 70% or more.

I personally would not waste my time on 2 different drives.
 
I have already basically said why.

I see the OP does not know anything about Raid so advise you Google some good reviews and guides on it as its too hard to explain.

WiKi may have it in Laymans terms.
 
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I stand by what I advised originally, you will get around twice the read and write speed of a single drive, and if I were to set up a Raid 1 then I would definately pick different drives, and there is little reason to avoid this in RAID 0. Wiki supports this, I was just wondering, for the sake of discussion why you would disagree?
 
You show me a REP source to show Raid0 gives 2x the Speed (you can do it as easy and I can disprove it) and remember WiKi is wrote by normal peeps and can be wrong.

I ain't a expert in Raid but Raid0 was always bout 60% gain with possibly a bit more now due to modern HDD's.

Some peep other day reported 70% gains on his WD RE3's or Sammy F1's.
 
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I was thinking to raid when I get some more money...is it hard to set up and is it worth it?

like what is it fast at in general?
 
helmutcheese, you are quite correct that in an average of real world applications the speed increases seen using RAID0 are likely to be lower than the maximum theroetically possible. There are lots of variables that effect this, stripe size, controller efficiency and not least application usage.

It is the same with RAID1, you should theroetically get faster read times, whilst maintaining similar write times, but this seems rarely implimented on recent controller drivers.

I was thinking to raid when I get some more money...is it hard to set up and is it worth it?
Click to expand...

It is very easy to set up, whether it is worth it depends on what you wish to acheive. For some apps it is a better bet to go with two of the new 300GB samsung drives in RAID0, rather than a Raptor, and obviously a lot cheaper.
 
WHOA guys - chill out :cool:

I do have an understanding of raid and the different levels - but I was in front of my PC and knew i would get a faster response from here :) then me finding out my old cisco books and reading up, though i should still dig them out and read up! :)

Leezy - it's really easy. I have two different manufacturer's drives but both are 500gb and im pretty sure both 32mb cache - not sure on speeds... :rolleyes:

I selected Raid in my bios for the hard drives and i got a text based menu come up - selected raid0 and which hard drives and it done it automatically, formatted etc. Only issue i had was my bios defaulted to my old skool ide backup drive and got the error message "NTLDR not found" but a quick google search sorted that (Its where a boot record is not found simply or hdd issues). Changed that in bios and it worked.

Must say I have found a HUGE increase in speed, things just move, copy and install so much faster + you get the extra space :D

Also - My vista rating for my hard drives went from 5.7 to 5.9 so I get perfect score across the board :p
 
Must say I have found a HUGE increase in speed,
Click to expand...

Time to start saving for the SSD drive then, the pursuit of speed is a slippery slope.

I have to say that when I went from a single drive to two in RAID0 I was pretty impressed, the jump from two to four was less noticable, and not really worth the risk.

Glad it worked out for you.
 
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