• Notice regarding image hosts and attachments. See here.

Raid query

webb

webb

webb

Associate
Joined
8 Jan 2011
Posts
116
Location
England West Yorkshire
Well here goes been reading up on raid and its not the all an powerful missing thing in my life it would seem :rolleyes:

but still my main dilemma is should i raid 0 my 2 1TB drives or my 2 250GB drives as only will have windows/program files on it seems a waste of space to use the bigger drives ? but are there any advantages ?

if 250GB could buy more cheaply :D and then go raid 5 or 10

also can u have two sets of raid 0 running at same time ? and would i be better of using my Startech 2-Port SATA III 6Gbps PCI-Express Controller Card [PEXSAT32] or use on board raid from my P5Q Pro ?

any help advise as always welcome Webb
 
mukhs11 said:
i wud personally. advise to go for W-Raptor hdd's for best peformance. cheaper hdd's tend to be lower than 6,000rpm. regarding raids's i would advise to to read this article to get better understandingan then decide based on budget vs performace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Click to expand...

been there read the advise thanks but its all a bit technical and goes into too much detail

As i see it in layman terms raid 0 same as one drive (as drive failure goes) but faster search time's with two drives

raid 1 same search time's as one drive but if one fails u saved

raid 5 or 10 u get both of the above meaning faster search times and if one drive fails u still OK as long as u replace before all the others fail (using 4 or more drives)

PS i never had one fail to press and if u not using raid u only got one drive lol how safe are u ?

really wanted to know if i should use lots of small drives or is there any advantage using the big drives ?

and been told that using on-board raid not as good as a raid card ?

pss all my drives 7200 rpm
 
The probablity of having a failed drive is directly proportional to the number of drives you are using, so more drives, more likely to have a failure.

I'm not sure that Raid 5 or 10 would give you faster search times, but they certainly give slower write speeds, particulary with a motherboard 'software' raid controller.

If you want to try Raid and fell the urge to experiment, then go ahead, give it a whirl. I have a home PC with 2 80Gbyte discs in raid 0, but it gets very regular backups! I know it would be faster with just one modern 500Gbyte single platter drive, I just haven't got around to doing something about it.

That Startech SATA 3 card uses the same technology that your motherboad controller uses, high performance raid cards have on board processors and memory, and price tags well into 3 figures.
 
Last edited:
malcolm said:
The probablity of having a failed drive is directly proportional to the number of drives you are using, so more drives, more likely to have a failure.

I'm not sure that Raid 5 or 10 would give you faster search times, but they certainly give slower write speeds, particulary with a motherboard 'software' raid controller.

If you want to try Raid and fell the urge to experiment, then go ahead, give it a whirl. I have a home PC with 2 80Gbyte disc's in raid 0, but it gets very regular backups! I know it would be faster with just one modern 500Gbyte single platter drive, I just haven't got around to doing something about it.

That Startech SATA 3 card uses the same technology that your motherboad controller uses, high performance raid cards have on board processors and memory, and price tags well into 3 figures.
Click to expand...

thanks Malcolm for the input u just gave me a new insite as to how the raid card is the way to go ...... wondered how they must be better lol sure i got link here for far less than u say tho ......... as for the slow rite's ill have to look that up ;)
 
For a cheap card that likely does enough for your setup (it peaks at 1000MB/sec read/write) have a hunt around the usual places etc for an old perc 5/i. It uses a PCIe 4x (or bigger) slot and depending how clever you are with modding/providing a little extra cooling may well require a spare slot below it but they ARE relatively cheap (~£100) and well covered by guides etc.
 
Mercutio said:
For a cheap card that likely does enough for your setup (it peaks at 1000MB/sec read/write) have a hunt around the usual places etc for an old perc 5/i. It uses a PCIe 4x (or bigger) slot and depending how clever you are with modding/providing a little extra cooling may well require a spare slot below it but they ARE relatively cheap (~£100) and well covered by guides etc.
Click to expand...

i have been looking at this card, and it is readily available at those usual places however they never seem to come with cable's ? this card also has issue's with Intel chipsets something to do with the "SMBus" conflicting with the motherboard's memory detection not sure if this would effect my board tho

also it runs hot and needs a constant airflow supply would my 120mm side fan suffice this ? and would it have to run on full which it doesn't at the moment on PWR

so the biggest hurdle with this card is the scarceness of the cables ....... plus the cables them self are massive and would be nightmare if not impossible to mod

if i spent a little more what better solutions are out there ?

as always any help advise welcome Webb
 
ive got a raid velociraptor srtup, its better than non raid, but not twice as quick, worth it? its better for me than ssd due to big capacity
 
al4x said:
ive got a raid velociraptor srtup, its better than non raid, but not twice as quick, worth it? its better for me than ssd due to big capacity
Click to expand...

not entirely sure what "srtup" is lol? and are u using on-board raid or a dedicated card
 
Raid is more in-depth than i fort it would be, and more expensive too, anyway decided while i look for that all elusive perfect dedicated card i may as well raid my win 7 installation in 0 or 1 raid mode ........

but would i be better off using on-board raid "P5Q Pro" or use my Startech 2-Port SATA III 6Gbps PCI-Express Controller Card [PEXSAT32]

also if i do raid win 7 and save it to many dvd's can i reinstall it to one drive or the raided new drives if the worst should happen presuming i go for raid 0
PS only got pci_e x1 slots, no pci_e x2

also for raid 0 would i have to reinstall ? pain ..... but not for raid 1
 
webb said:
i have been looking at this card, and it is readily available at those usual places however they never seem to come with cable's ? this card also has issue's with Intel chipsets something to do with the "SMBus" conflicting with the motherboard's memory detection not sure if this would effect my board tho

also it runs hot and needs a constant airflow supply would my 120mm side fan suffice this ? and would it have to run on full which it doesn't at the moment on PWR

so the biggest hurdle with this card is the scarceness of the cables ....... plus the cables them self are massive and would be nightmare if not impossible to mod

if i spent a little more what better solutions are out there ?

as always any help advise welcome Webb
Click to expand...

I found a couple of places selling the cables cheap (lookup "sas to 4xsata cable" on a popular search engines shopping search and you should get hits with the cable for under £10, it's sas you want, not mini-sas. I've found cables for £6 delivered but I can't think of any easy way to point you at them without breaking competitor mentioning rules).

The cables vary too, i've got a set that ARE proper massive, like 90cm x4 but i've got them round the back of my mobo tray etc without issue. There's some much shorter tho.

The SMbus issue was easy dealt with fairly easilly with a bit of precisely cut packing tape over the 2 effected pins.

The heatsink etc isse - that ones a bit more tricky. If the 120mm blowing at it is shifting a decent amount of air then yup, no problem. In my case I found the zalman flower chipset cooler (while MASSIVE and blocking lots of other slots) was fine in my setup. It has the mounting brackets etc to line up with the hooks on the card.

Any problems/queries etc if you go the perc route, drop me a mail and i'll try and help out. I've gone from server pulled card on backplate to a regular pci-bracket card with bigger memory, cooling, cables and battery etc. It's now running the 2nd raid i've built on it. The LSI mega raid software can talk to the card ok (actually took the risky step of adding a drive to my raid hot, without a backup and while it took about 28 hours to resync the disks all is solid and running a dream again) so you don't REALLY even have to mess in the cards bios once your plugged in and running.

1 last thing. If you are only planning raid-0 or 1 go with the onboard. It will do a perfectly fine job of it with a pair of disks.

Hardware raid cards are once you want to go raid-5 (at least 3 drives) or 4+ disk raid-0

Also - if you go onboard (I would) go into the mobo bios, set the sata controller to raid and you'll get a new screen on boot. Set your drives up here. The in-windows software raid thing is "ok" but not the best you'll do by a long way.
 
Last edited:
webb said:
Raid is more in-depth than i fort it would be, and more expensive too, anyway decided while i look for that all elusive perfect dedicated card i may as well raid my win 7 installation in 0 or 1 raid mode ........

but would i be better off using on-board raid "P5Q Pro" or use my Startech 2-Port SATA III 6Gbps PCI-Express Controller Card [PEXSAT32]

also if i do raid win 7 and save it to many dvd's can i reinstall it to one drive or the raided new drives if the worst should happen presuming i go for raid 0
PS only got pci_e x1 slots, no pci_e x2

also for raid 0 would i have to reinstall ? pain ..... but not for raid 1
Click to expand...

Hmm, couple of things with this. Once you raid you are generally stuck with that manufacturers raid cards on that set of drives (they often implement things a little differently from 1 controller manufact to another). So raid if you like but you'll need to move the data off the raid, flatten the disks, setup on the new raid controller and move the data back.

If you only ever want to use intel mobo's raid then you should be fine raiding now. The advantage of the card is you can take it anywhere (at least till they stop making mobo's with the cards connector).

As far as raid recovery in windows 7 - you SHOULD be fine. Win 7 knows about a LOT of controllers (it picked up the intel onboard and perc controllers on mine) so you should be fine to recover a raid and it won't really make it much harder than a single disk recovery. Depends on your backups etc (if any).

I WOULD say quickly at this point - the backup setup in win 7 IS uber. I tend to be tech support for friends and 1 who's computer I set the backup on had a problem - booted off the setup disk, click restore, hit next a few times, computer back on it's feet. Took about 1 minutes work and 30 minutes waiting.

If you mean back it up to lots of DVD and restore it, yup. Windows is windows, the raid stuff is lower level than your backup. Windows will install with the raid drivers etc present but it won't give a fig if it's now running on single disk.
 
Last edited:
Mercutio said:
The SMbus issue was easy dealt with fairly easilly with a bit of precisely cut packing tape over the 2 effected pins.
Click to expand...

Hi looked this up and yes can be overcome as u said :D

Mercutio said:
The heatsink etc isse - that ones a bit more tricky. If the 120mm blowing at it is shifting a decent amount of air then yup, no problem. In my case I found the zalman flower chipset cooler (while MASSIVE and blocking lots of other slots) was fine in my setup. It has the mounting brackets etc to line up with the hooks on the card.
Click to expand...

this is the major bad thing about this card i don't like "other than the cables" i don't think my 120 side fan would cool it? only 39 CFM will do more but noisy :( plus its more in-line with my graphics card the perc would be below the main airflow

Mercutio said:
1 last thing. If you are only planning raid-0 or 1 go with the onboard. It will do a perfectly fine job of it with a pair of disks.
Click to expand...

thanks for all your advise ill only be raiding my currant win 7 installation and program files, all data saved stuff on separate drive, but if i go for raid 0 will i have to reinstall windows ? sorry if u answered this and i didn't understand
 
why are raid cards so expensive? :confused: i seen some today for over 2 grand :eek: ...... and why isn't there any low priced one's that are a bit out of date like graphics cards? ..... are they a new thing and not had time to get cheep?

anyway saved my win 7 ultimate system image to external usb drive also saved as a back up for individual back up going to raid 0 two 250GB drives and restore the system image to the raided drives ....... well i hope thats what I'm going to do anyone see any floors in my idea?

also might buy another drive so i don't have to use the one with win 7 on ;)

as always any help advise welcome Webb
 
Webb,

There are also storage solutions that are worth millions. Of course a raidcontroller that costs like 500 pound is normaly used only in proffesional servers. Proffesional IT hardware is expensive because it needs to be very reliable and fast. If 1000 employees can't work for an hour then that is a much bigger loss then a RAID controller of 500 pound. Also, if you buy a database license worth 20,000 pound than it should better run on the fastest hardware because otherwise you waste money on a license that is not used fully.
 
RazorBlade said:
Webb,

There are also storage solutions that are worth millions. Of course a raidcontroller that costs like 500 pound is normaly used only in proffesional servers. Proffesional IT hardware is expensive because it needs to be very reliable and fast. If 1000 employees can't work for an hour then that is a much bigger loss then a RAID controller of 500 pound. Also, if you buy a database license worth 20,000 pound than it should better run on the fastest hardware because otherwise you waste money on a license that is not used fully.
Click to expand...

OK can see your point but why hasn't anyone seen the potential for a card at a reasonably price marketed at home users wanting to use raid ? madness i tell u :rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom