RAID ?

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BIGBC

BIGBC

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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
 
Perfectly possible yes.
If you're wanting to maximise read and write speeds, then you'll want to use RAID 0.
This will mean you only have 500GB between the two drives, and no redundancy (indeed, if one drive fails, potentially all data on both drives is lost - although there's a chance of recovering this if you do it properly, and are lucky!).
So basically, it'll come down to whether you can afford to lose the 500GB in space, and are planning on putting your data (or at least a well-maintained backup of it) on the 1TB?
 
anti5580 said:
You mean 1Tb :eek:
Click to expand...

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 . . .
 
OS on a WD green and storage on an F1? - that may not be the most effective usage of your disks.

RAIDing the WD greens would definitely increase the read/write speeds, but you will still be stuck with slow response times, random reads etc, as the Greens are made for efficiency not speed. If I were you, use the Samsung F1 as your OS drive and RAID WD green as storage.
 
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 ?
 
anti5580 said:
You mean 1Tb :eek:
Click to expand...

Sorry yes, of course I do....I apologise, I've spent the last 2 days with very little sleep and a raging headache...it's making me spout some garbage apparently. :(
As long as you don't give your RAID controller some ludicrous settings (leave them at default), and it's not complete pants in the first place, the 2 WDs should beat the F1 yes :)
RAID 1 should give you faster read times yes, but both this (and the write time overhead, if any), is down to the controller...
 
Two greens is likely to be faster than the F1, they'll certainly dominate in read and write speeds.

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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
I have 2 WD RE3 in RAID0 & 2 500gb disks non RAID on my onboard ICH10R controller. I use the RAID disks for OS & games & the 2 500 gb disks for media/backup.

Works very well on my ASUS P5Q-E. I followed advice on here that was basically install the RAID disks 1st then install the others once the raid has an OS on it. Maybe I got lucky but I have no issues at all.
 
Interesting to hear that. I went for OS on the single disk and raid for storage, and could not persuade it to boot from the single disk. It persisted in trying to boot from the raid.

In hindsight putting grub on the raid would probably have done the trick, but I didn't know enough to try this at the time.
 
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.
 
It *should* work fine, but raid is a tricky business and occasionally surprises people. I'm starting to feel it's best avoided.
 
the WD greens have very good NCQ due to there slow 5400RPM speeds, the samsung would likely hold back that speed as it have to wait for the samsung drive if used in an 3 way RAID but only in random thats all in constant read or write the greens would be limiting factor, personally you not notice it any way RAIDing more then 2 HDDs norm does not = more speed unless your using DVD 3-4 burners at the same time

the WD greens have very good random access speeds why i use them in my server and they run very cool as well (why Media benchmarks score better on greens then most 7200 disks)

if using windows vista or 7, you should have no problems with RAID as it natively has drivers for ICH10 RAID or ICH10 AHCI

try to use AHCI or RAID when installing windows as both support NCQ (IDE/Sata mode norm does Not)
 
sorry to hijack

at work we use raid incase one of our drives should fail it's backed up on the second.

am i right in saying this is Raid1?

I'm wanting to upgrade my hdd to make it faster and was looking at a SSD but it's pricing me out with the new arrivals from ATI top of my list.

I've currently got a 750F1. would a second in Raid 1 or 0 be faster?
 
A second F1 750 should add speed in RAID0.

My 500gb Sammy F1 was doing about 90 in single mode, those 2 wd RE3's do about 220, so more than double by using them. I would guess the 2 750 F1's to be around double too which is still pretty good.
 
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