Seagate 7200.10 putting in Raid with Maxtor?

tommy_knockers · 20 Dec 2006 at 10:24

Hello I purchased 2x 320gb Seagate 7200.10 yesterday (before I read that they can be noisy :rolleyes:

)

ATM i have a Maxtor Maxline III 250gb SATAII.

What is the best configuration for me to put my hard drives in? I reckon they have to be the same size for RAID to work properly.

What RAID should I put them in? I play mostly games and have lots of "homemade

dvds", which I would not like to lose.

What is the best option for me to do.

p.s How long does delivery take. We have moved out to Rep of Ireland now so they are sending it by Parcelforce 48hr. been 2 days still nothing :S

Really really annoying because I wanted to buy loads of stuff of them but I went over the weight limit, so I could not buy some stuff I really needed (e.g a new CPU cooler, the stock intel is driving me CRAZY :mad:

)

Oh well Im ranting now.

Cheers

tommy_knockers · 20 Dec 2006 at 10:45

Hello?

Magic · 20 Dec 2006 at 10:49

Raid Stripe will be very fast if you have an onboard (or otherwise) controller that supports it, you could use the 250gb as a backup drive incase one of the stripes failed (as you would loose all 640gb), its best to keep raid drives the same size afaik.

You will notice a big difference when dealing with large files.

Would have to be a file level backup as 250gb obviously wont hold all 2x320gb.

tommy_knockers · 20 Dec 2006 at 10:53

Cheers

How would I go about doing this? I am a complete N00b when it comes to HDD's cheers.

My Motherboard is http://www.asrock.com/product/775XFire-eSATA2+.htm

I know its sucks. I have been living with it for ages.

Only getting 86,000 on aquamark3

Magic · 20 Dec 2006 at 11:10

4 x Serial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel® Matrix Storage), NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions, and 1 ATA100 IDE port

Looks like you board supports raid.

Raid can work in 2 ways, striping or mirroring (ignoring the more complex versions)

Mirroring is where you use two same size drives and basically tell the raid controller to write exactly the same data to both drives, this protects against one drive failing (not against virusses and file deletion, as they are exact copies) but does mean you have to loose half you capacity.

Striping is where you (effectively) store half of each file on each drive and hence it takes half the time to retrieve the data, whilst still having the full capacity of both drives - however, should one of the drives fail, you will loose all of the data (640gb in your case).

Once you have setup the raid bios (see your manual) and setup the required array (speed or security), the windows installer will need you to press f6 to install a third party raid driver, after this point, windows sees either kind of array as a single drive, and from there its easy!

Problems ive had before include, finding the right drivers during install and poor performance (due to the fact i didnt have the motherboard drivers installed after i had setup windows and everything else).

There are other kinds of arrays like raid 5 which has backup drives and speed increases but are generally used for servers etc.

Hope this helps.

rpstewart · 20 Dec 2006 at 11:18

First off your sig is about 3 times as big as is allowed...

I doubt that changing the disk setup will make much difference for gaming benchmarks, once the benchmark is loaded it's down to your CPU & graphics.

You've got two options for how you set up the disks, assuming that you want to RAID0 the Seagates. You can either run the array as a second disk and continue with Windows on the 250Gb disk or you can put windows on the RAID array and use the 250Gb as a storage/backup disk.

In either case you'll need to create the array in the motherboard BIOS (the manual should give you the full instructions). If you want to run the array as an extra drive it should then just be a case of partitioning and formatting it in Disk Management.

To install windows on the array is a bit trickier. First you'd be better off removing the 250Gb disk temporarily so that everything goes onto the array. You'll need to make sure that the array is created and set correctly in the boot order menu then you can go ahead and install Windows. Since you'll be using RAID you'll need the controller drivers on a floppy before you start, the mobo CD should include them. When prompted press F6 to add new storage drivers then S when prompted to actually get them from the floppy. Once this is done the install should proceed as normal.

The trick to the above is removing the 250Gb disk, if everything goes pear shaped you can plug it back in, reset the boot order and get back to where you are at the moment if necessary.