RAID

Graeme43

Graeme43

Graeme43

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304
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Hello :D I want to create a RAID setup on my Xeon computer because I need the extra speed ;) It has SATA-2 support.

"RAID-0. This technique has no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance but no fault-tolerance whatsoever. If you lose one drive, the whole array will fail. At least 2 drives needed"

I was wanting to buy another 320GB drive like I have and buy the 600GB Lacie USB2 external that is on OCuk for backing up.

I have a WD 3200JD (WDC WD3200JD-22KLB0) drive which is the 320GB SE16 SATA 1 edition. It is discontinued. I was hoping to buy the drive but its not for sale anywhere.... :rolleyes: it has been replaced by the 3200KS (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-070-WD)

Soooo does anyone know if the WD 320GB model 3200JD and 3200KS would work in a RAID? It'd save me buying another drive! :D

Thanks :D
 
You'll be able to RAID the two different WD drives without any problem. You'll also have to backup everything and reinstall everything as setting up RAID0 will wipe both drives.

Is it this Lacie drive? If so are you aware that this is a RAID0 array in a case and hence is not the best idea for a backup drive?
 
Sorry to preach but a backup is worthless unless you can guarantee being able to recover it at any time. To me using a RAID0 array for backups is daft, especially when there are plenty of other options for the same kind of money which don't have the disadvantages of RAID0.
 
rpstewart said:
Sorry to preach but a backup is worthless unless you can guarantee being able to recover it at any time. To me using a RAID0 array for backups is daft, especially when there are plenty of other options for the same kind of money which don't have the disadvantages of RAID0.
Click to expand...

Give me one proper disadvantage, if he has 2 raid arrays, and one fails, hell still have 1 working with the data, in this case the lacie, 600gb in raid0 is a lot cheaper as losing money on a single 600 gb drive, wich will be overpriced, and its faster (the lacie), true the lacie also has the chanse of one hdd failing, but whats the chanse of both raid 0 arrays being destroyed at once, i have 5 hdd's, of wich 2 are older than 3 years, nothing has died so far here...

If 1 hdd died then he'll be able to replace it, copy back data, and have everything work as before...

If the lacie fail,s then he can copy back the data from his original 2 hdd's, either way if one drive no matter wich fails, he'll still have the data...

What I'm always so confused about is why people are always assuming a drive will fail, i have yet to see any drive fail i've owned in last 8 years ( the above was about the hdd's i'm still using, old ones are sold...) , i highly doubt an array will fail more often in its lifetime than survive its lifetime, i'm sure the failrure rate isnt like 50% per 2 or 3 years, while by then a lot of people will have their hdd's replaced by then( to larger&faster hdd's)...
 
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Well I'm afraid HDDs fail, it's a fact of life, if you've never seen one in 8 years then you've been very lucky. I've seen enough fail to know that it's a risk and when it comes to backups I'm not willing to take that risk.
 
It's perfectly possible, I run RAID0 myself, it's all about having a sensible backup strategy. What you need to do is determine what you have that needs to be backed up and how easily you need to get at the backup.

Personally I use an external 250Gb HDD and anything I have lying around gets sync'd onto that regularly, once I've got 4Gb of related stuff it gets burned to DVD and moved to a path that isn't sync'd with the external disk. If it's important stuff (photos etc) then it sits on a RAID5 array in the PC and on two DVDs, one of which is offsite.
 
I want to be able to backup all the stuff on my drive, its all important and can't be recollected :eek: Just now I have a 320 internal and 300 and 250 external which I backup my 320 to the 250 just now as its not full and the 300 is full without backup.

If I had 2 x 320 raid I can fit all my stuff on the RAID and backup everything by cloning to something that'll fit it all :D
 
Can you not just continue to use your 250Gb & 300Gb disks for backups? With some judicious zipping and discounting space for system restores, a swap file and windows itself the capcity difference isn't that big.

By cloning are you thinking of using a Ghost image or the like? I wouldn't recommend them for data backups, all you get is a point in time snapshot of the system. As a result if you clone on a Sunday and then delete an important file on a Friday you can't recover that file without overwriting all the changes you've made on the system since the image was taken. A file level backup is much more flexible for data backups.
 
I have 500GB of stuff I need to backup, so if I had a 640GB RAID then I can do a straight clone to the 600 every 3 days and that means if the main fails that I'll only lose a few days of logs basically.

I use software that clones my drive to another identically and will only update what is required to make it identical so the process is quick after the first backup.
 
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Suggestion: Set up a RAID0 array on your PC as you've suggested, but then partition it into 2 partitions to ease backup. Buy 2 seperate external disks (or that lacie, if it's possible to run it as 2 independent disks and not in RAID0) and clone/image each partition onto its own backup disk. Thus, you have the speed benefit of RAID0 array in general use, but still have it effectively backed up onto seperate disks.

That said, IMNSHO I must say that while it's true the Lacie enclosure is more likely to break due to it's RAID0 nature, that does not make it a practical likelihood as such -- to put it differently, a very very small likelihood doubled, is still a very small likelihood. (Analogously, if you buy 2 tickets in the lottery, your chances of winning it is doubled. Does that in practice make it *likely* you'll win the lottery? No. It is true to say your chances of winning has doubled, but that makes very little difference in practice.) Hence, particularly if you use if for backup only it would further reduce the likelihood of failure since your usage pattern would be substantially less than that of the average hard drive. The danger of course is that both one of your primary drive set and one of your backup drive set fail at the same time, and that probability is very very small. Still, I've suggested a way for you to avoid the complications and slight increase in risk due to RAID0 on your backup device above. :)
 
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Ya think I could use a maxtor 300 and a wd 320 to make a 600gb raid? :confused:

Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.

If that works then I can save moolah :D and the 600 can mirror the 600gb raid
 
The Lacie RAID 0 bigger disks suck totally avoid avoid avoid.

Do not use them for back up you are asking for trouble.

We used a lot at work I think the failure rate was 30% maybe more. Not funny having to spend £1300 to get 500GB recovered from those useless things.

Either buy a proper raid card or if you must have RAID 0 for speed mirror them as well its not as if 300GB disks are expensive.
 
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snowdog said:
Give me one proper disadvantage, if he has 2 raid arrays, and one fails, hell still have 1 working with the data, in this case the lacie, 600gb in raid0 is a lot cheaper as losing money on a single 600 gb drive, wich will be overpriced, and its faster (the lacie), true the lacie also has the chanse of one hdd failing, but whats the chanse of both raid 0 arrays being destroyed at once, i have 5 hdd's, of wich 2 are older than 3 years, nothing has died so far here...

If 1 hdd died then he'll be able to replace it, copy back data, and have everything work as before...

If the lacie fail,s then he can copy back the data from his original 2 hdd's, either way if one drive no matter wich fails, he'll still have the data...

What I'm always so confused about is why people are always assuming a drive will fail, i have yet to see any drive fail i've owned in last 8 years ( the above was about the hdd's i'm still using, old ones are sold...) , i highly doubt an array will fail more often in its lifetime than survive its lifetime, i'm sure the failrure rate isnt like 50% per 2 or 3 years, while by then a lot of people will have their hdd's replaced by then( to larger&faster hdd's)...
Click to expand...

i hate to say it but all drives will fail, ive owned and used lacie hdd's for several years, and am well into double figures with them, ive had one fail on me before now. dont forget there magnetic media and utilise an electric motor with what ammounts to a razor blade sitting just a fraction of a mm above a couple of effectivly dvd like plastic platters spinning at 7200 rpm, one significant jolt will send the arm crashing into the surface of the disc causing hdd failure, plus the fragility of the chip sets and power bridge's means that as good as external hdd's are there not fool proof.
 
I got the LaCie USB2 600GB, but it only gives me 5-8mb/s transfer speed :mad: :mad: :mad: USB 2 max says 60MB/s and I know that it wont constantly be that but I was expecting it to be at least 20 considering it said it was very fast and it has drives in RAID 0. I can't stand the speed of it, I might just return it for being extremely slow and get the 750GB seagate firewire drive :rolleyes:

It's SOOO SLOW!!! 16+ hours just to fill it and yes I have USB2
 
The RAID0 is of no speed benefit because the USB connection is the bottleneck but you should be able to get 20-30Mb/s though.

What sort of files are you moving onto it? Small files will be slower than big ones because the disk heads have to keep going back and forward between the allocation tables and the data. I also found that performance was far better when I formatted the drive as NTFS rather than FAT32.
 
My file sizes range from 300mb to 1gb files

My single firewire drive gets 3x the performance where it seeming to do stuff very quick but the lacie takes ages

After the 250gb file copy is done (which is at 4 out of 5 hours estimated time right now is done, I'll do a performance test on both my fw + usb drive and the lacie to see if its slower than other USB drives I have which seemed to perform acceptable :confused:
 
If your PC has a spare SATA connection and 5.25" bay then consider Icy Box's caddyless drive dock - just plug in any SATA drive, backup at full SATA speed then remove it when finished. I have two 400GB drives in a RAID1 and back them up to 250GB drives with plenty to spare (at the moment).

Jonathan
 
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