RAID

NathanE

NathanE

NathanE

Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
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London & Singapore
Hi,

I just bought a new PC (DS4 motherboard, 2x Seagate 500GB) and I want to set these drives up as a mirror image of each other.

What sort of performance increase am I looking at here? I know the theory is that read performance should increase quite a bit and write performance should be roughly the same. Can anyone put some real figures on that? :)

Also how does one setup the "Intel Matrix RAID" - do you just press a key at the RAID controller POST screen and set everything up in like a BIOS style screen? I might have a RAID 0 partition for Windows and a RAID 1 for everything else.

PS: I'm a total RAID cluebie if you haven't already realised :D
 
u cant set up 2 different types of raid on the same drives i dont think mate, usually yea u set up in the post but u also have to enable it in your bios settings. also u must remember that when u install windows onto the drives u need the raid drivers on a disk before u install as it asks for them when u load the os ( i presume your using xp)

if u want a partition i would set up the primary raid setup up first, install windows then use partition magic to create a new partition.

as for performance increase u will notice it more with things like unpacking rar files or large transfers
 
Last edited:
alangelluk said:
u cant set up 2 different types of raid on the same drives i dont think mate
Click to expand...
The Intel Matrix RAID controllers are the only ones that I know of which support this. During the array setup you can specify how much of each disk is used in each array and then use the remaining space for another array.

In theory this mix of RAID1 and RAID0 gives you a good compromise between speed and redundancy but you have to remember that you only have two sets of read/write heads so copying from one array to the other is going to be slow.

The recovery process for the RAID1 part should be automatic, plug the new disk in and the system should rebuild on to it. In a plit array scenario this will only work for the RAID1 part, the RAID0 part is not recoverable.
 
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=matrixraid&page=4
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/matrix-raid/index.x?pg=7

Just been reading these articles. It seems the performance increase of RAID 1 is quite subjective depending on the task at hand. I found this quite surprising as you'd think with 2 heads as opposed to 1 head that read performance would almost unconditionally be greater. I can't help but still think RAID 1 will pull ahead when there are multiple concurrent read operations though - and the benchmarks done by Techreport tend to indicate that.

I can't really see many uses for RAID 0 on my new PC. It would be good for a page file but with 4GB of RAM I don't think it's worth worrying about.

So I think I'll just make single RAID 1 array.
 
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