raid questions

kmufc77

kmufc77

kmufc77

Soldato
Joined
15 Jul 2007
Posts
4,953
Location
South West
hi all i have just bought a new samsung F1 drive and have today installed a fresh install of vista 64 on it, the drive seems a way bit quicker than my previous WD 8mb cache, and im thinking about getting another samsung F1 drive to use as raid.

do i have to do a clean install of vista to use raid on 2 drives or can i just se it up in bios then carry on with my current vista install

will i notice a big increase in load times and gamming with raid installed

do i use raid 0 , raid 1 and dont really undertstand the difference between mirror and stripped even though ive read the hard drive section on here

can someone educate me on these questions i would really aprechaite it

Thanks
 
Last edited:
Yes, got to start fresh.

You won't notice any difference in load times because the actual difference is a few seconds max, with gaming load times are the only area with HDD speed matters.
 
With raid 0 (striping) the disks are joined together in parallel. For example, in a 2 drive setup, any given file is written 50% to one drive and 50% to the other. A two drive setup will combine the space, so two 500Gb drives will form a 1000Gb (1Tb) volume. As most people will tell you - you will only see a slight difference when larger files are involved (video editing for example).
However - if one of the drives in a raid 0 setup fails, you will lose all your data. In the case of a 2 drive raid 0 array, you are twice as more likely to have a data loss due to drive failure over a single drive. This goes up as you add more drives to the raid set.

Raid 1, mirroring - much easier to understand. In the example of a two drive setup, you are asking the array to mirror the data exactly over both drives - in effect a real-time backup. So for two 500Gb drives, you will have 500Gb of drive space, but you have a complete backup in the event of one of the drives failing.

In short (what you really need to know) RAID 0 striping (for performance) is not worth the slight gains you see when moving large volumes of data, especially when you factor the risk of data loss and cost.

If you want to provide a complete up-to-date backup, that will keep your data/OS intact in the event of one of the drives failing - then RAID 1 mirroring is worth considering.

If you're looking to upgrade your machine to get a performance increase, you will see more improvements, more of the time by upgrading your GPU
 
You'll only need to re-install for RAID 0; with RAID 1 the controller will copy the first drive to the second - you just have to make sure you get them the right way round.
 
Just to add to what mr darkblade has put
The only real time you will get massive gains from using RAID 0 is when you are encoding video from raw AVI files ( very large. 160 Gigs or so for 90 mins 720/576 - 24 bit )
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom