RAID ?

BIGBC · 12 Sep 2009 at 15:57

I have 2x500GB Western Digital Caviar Green's and a new Samsung F1 1TB.
I had previously been using one 500GB as the OS + programs then the other 500GB as data storage.

Is it possible to put the two 500GB's together in RAID to increase the read speeds on my OS + apps and still use my single 1TB as storage ?

Ive never played with RAID before, dont really know the in's + out's

Cheers

BIGBC · 12 Sep 2009 at 18:38

anti5580 said:
You mean 1Tb

Yeah thats what I was thinking - if theres no redundancy. Though as im new to this I was a tad confused.
So RAID 0 would be fastest ? but give me 1TB between the two ?
I would have thought RAID 1 (where the 2 drives are identical copies right ?) would be the fastest as it should double the read times or have I got the wrong end of the stick here ?

I need to have the 1TB as data storage seperate to the OS + apps so using it as direct backup isnt for me. I do however take regular backups of my important stuff.

This is all kinda pointless atm though as my Gigabyte UD5 wont even load windows when all 3 HDDs are connected . . .

BIGBC · 12 Sep 2009 at 20:06

Ive been using the WD greens for 14 months now as OS and storage. Ive had no problems with them and wouldnt call them slow. Granted if I were to be buying them again I would go for the blacks.
Surely RAID on 2xWD greens is faster than a single Samsung F1 ?

BIGBC · 13 Sep 2009 at 00:47

JonJ678 said:
An issue not mentioned here is that the intel onboard controller really doesn't like having some drives in raid and some in jbod. I spent a long time trying to run a raid 5 and a raptor for the os at the same time and failed, ended up with the raid in software. Less of an issue if the board has multiple sata controllers.

Thats what I was wondering about, ive heard having a mixture can be complicated.
I wasnt really experiencing any issues with the non-RAID speeds but thought I might aswell utilise both drives.

BIGBC · 13 Sep 2009 at 23:34

I dont know enough to try any RAID setups atm lol. Ive seen a few RAID options in the BIOS but dont really know how to go about setting it up. Was just seeing if it was plausible to have RAID HDDs with none RAID HDDs.