Raid1 to Raid0?

TheMorningStar · 23 Sep 2008 at 20:06

Hi guys. bit of an odd one for you. Can i turn my raid 1 aray into a raid 0 aray without reinstalling?

It takes me the best part of a day to get my OS as i like it and generally another week to finish off the little tweeks as i think of them and my current install is just about perfect. I just want it faster.

I am currently running on an nforce4 chipset ASUS a8n-sli premium.

could i say take an image of my OS set raid to 0 in bios/raid setup then reimage?

or could i just select raid0 and the raid1 array would strip itself out where needed? or something odd like that...?

anyone tryed this? ideas?

Cheers Guys

Berserker · 23 Sep 2008 at 20:19

Changing RAID type will destroy all data. No ifs, no buts.

Imaging the OS will be your best answer. The problem you'll end up with is that the RAID 0 array will be bigger than the RAID 1. Usually fixable with a bit of partition tweaking.

TheMorningStar · 23 Sep 2008 at 20:53

Hi Berserker thanks for the reply

As soon as i posted that i remembered a nvidia actually have an installed interface to go with the raid drivers had a look around it and it turns out i can migrate data from a mirrored raid to a striped. im actually doing it now looks like it will take about an hour tops on 2 74gb raptors but it also identifies the new array as 138.5gb so im hoping fingers crossed i wont have to faf about with partitions resizing.

i'll post back to tell you how it goes. i have benchmarks from my old raid 0 and present raid1 so i can compare this migration and see if it performs as a raid0 should.

ill prolli end up with partitions twice the size they previously were but i can deal with that untill i need to fix it (dont like os drives bigger than 20gb)

TheMorningStar · 23 Sep 2008 at 21:53

ok just posting back incase you ahve any interest

migration worked fine without a hitch.. maybe not a good idea but you can use PC normally while in operation.. wouldnt recomend gaming and the like mind but web brousing movies music ect seemed ok lol

it kept my origonal partion sizes ect and mearly added a block of unallocated space at the end of my partition which for me is the best outcome as i just have to resize my games partion into that now and im set.

luckily wasnt currently running an install of vista on my second boot partition i imagen that may have caused issues, but a disk image backup would have taken care of that.

performance. 114mbps on a quick benchmark same benchmarke gave me 127 a year or so ago so maybe there is some performance hit from resizing like this. it is more than double the performance of raid1 though best case on that was 59mbps which is lowwer than the 65ish i got from a single drive.

HD tune (great disk benchmarker btw.. download it if you can) is giving me odd graph results.. very odd actually the first 15% of the drive spikes from 100mbps to 135mbps then the rest of the drive holds almost perfectly at 100mbps none of the arking steps you see with a normal drive. never seen a graph like this so this will need to be looked at. i think maybe an image and format then reimage may help. ill look at my cluster sizes if i can figur out how as well as my block sizes when i get a chance to play.

other than that very pleased with that saved me a ballake of a job

Berserker · 23 Sep 2008 at 23:10

Well I never. I'm impressed you can actually do that, and I'm glad I was proved wrong. Very nice. :cool:

PS - anyone else trying this, backup first. Have a power failure mid migration and I'll wager the results wouldn't be pretty.

TheMorningStar · 24 Sep 2008 at 01:06

Berserker said:
PS - anyone else trying this, backup first. Have a power failure mid migration and I'll wager the results wouldn't be pretty.

indeed

one thing worth noting though is you can move from mirrored to stripped but not the other way around. if you nave more disks installed perhaps other options will open up like striped and mirrored raid5 raid0+1 etc

oh and another little feature it looks like you can add a disk into your raid0 array and have it expand into that. i imagen it would also resize everything as needed as it did with me and leave a section of unpartitioned space towards the rear of the drive.

I am wondering now if this is just a nvidia implimentation or if i could find this or similar utils with other raid chipsets