RAID

[NathanE]

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

 

[NathanE]

Also, if a hard drive fails... how do you go about restoring the RAID from the good drive onto the new drive? Do you just plug in the new drive and it does it automatically?

 

[NathanE]

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.