Which to RAID? And a few boring questions...

That card:
a) is PCI-X, it will run in a normal PCI slot but it will be severly bandwidth limited.
b) doesn't support RAID5, only 0, 1 & 10

If you want RAID5 support that will give you decent write performance you're looking at spending around £300 on an Areca card with an onboard XOR engine. Highpoint do "Accelerated Software" cards from £100, they're fine for storage (I use one myself) but the writes aren't that much quicker than onboard RAID5, I certainly wouldn't want it as my only drive.
 
Having some second thoughts. I've already got the 320, as mentioned above.

How would 3 x 320 perform? And what RAID would it perform best in?

As far as I can gather, RAID5 is like RAID0 but with the security of keeping the data, should a hard drive fail?

I was considering selling the raptor and going for another 320.
 
With 3 disks your only options are RAID0 or RAID5. Both should give good read speeds although RAID0 will be faster because RAID5 will only read from 2 disks at any one time in a 3 disk array. Writes however are another matter entirely, unless you're willing to invest in a decent hardware RAID card like an Areca 1220 you won't get decent write speeds with RAID5. Therefore unless you're going for a decent card booting from RAID5 is not a good idea - swap file performance will be poor and hence task switching will be painful.

With three disks I'd be tempted to use 2 in RAID0 as the boot array and the third for backups.
 
rpstewart said:
With 3 disks your only options are RAID0 or RAID5. Both should give good read speeds although RAID0 will be faster because RAID5 will only read from 2 disks at any one time in a 3 disk array.
Click to expand...

I thought that RAID 5's Distributed Parity meant that all 3 spindles would be active?
 
Yes, the data is across all the spindles but each data block is only on n-1 drives, the parity for it is on the other one, therefore the reads only use n-1 disks although it's a different n-1 every time.
 
Cheers once again, my friend.

One last question and then I'll put all this advice into action.

How much data loss (if any), does putting your disks into an array, have?

With RAID0, I would definitely want some form of back up. Two 320GB's give you about 600GB - put them into RAID0, do you lose anymore space than that?

It's just that the difference in price between a 500GB and 750GB drive, is significantly different.
 
RAID0 will give you the combined space of the two drives (or twice the size of the smallest if they're not matched), so as you say 2*320Gb will give you ~596Gb reported by Windows.

You'll lose another few Mb when you format it due to space used by the indexes etc but that'll apply to any device.
 
Wow, this is how all threads should be :)

Rpstewart - if you're not a mod you should be. The quality and nature of your replies is second to none. [can't comment on the accuracy :p]
 
I'm back again.

Raptor should be arriving tomorrow and I'm going to raid two of those instead.

Sat here trying to get the nLite thing to set up and it's been going fine until I've needed to get the Raid drivers loaded on.

nLite is after an .inf file and the only one I can find is the one that was under the Gigaraid.exe file, entitled: 'iteraid.inf'

Does that sound right? Just want to make sure rather than plonking the wrong one on the disc.
 
Are you planning on using the Gigaraid ports or the Intel ones?

I think that .inf will give nLite the drivers for the Gigaraid controller, there should be another set for the Intel controller somewhere on the mobo CD.
 
rpstewart said:
Are you planning on using the Gigaraid ports or the Intel ones?

I think that .inf will give nLite the drivers for the Gigaraid controller, there should be another set for the Intel controller somewhere on the mobo CD.
Click to expand...

On your advice I was hoping to use the Intel ones, although the 'Gigaraid' immediately led me to think that it would be Gigabyte controllers/drivers.

I'll have another look about for them.
 
either get 2x 74gb 8mb's or 2x 74gb 16mb's (depending on which you own now) -just buy the same drive again

it'll be faster than 2x320gb's for sure
 
bledd. said:
either get 2x 74gb 8mb's or 2x 74gb 16mb's (depending on which you own now) -just buy the same drive again

it'll be faster than 2x320gb's for sure
Click to expand...

Got two 16mb Raptors. Understand you have the same, iirc.

As for the drivers, had a look but couldn't find anything - luckily the Gigabyte site has all that I need driver-wise, so it's just about going home and checking the revision number.
 
If Im running xp on a seperate drive, can vista be installed onto a raid without the use of a floppy disk or would it require something similar to nlite to enable this
 
silversurfer said:
If Im running xp on a seperate drive, can vista be installed onto a raid without the use of a floppy disk or would it require something similar to nlite to enable this
Click to expand...

As far as I know, Vista allows you to get drivers from a removeable disk drive.
 
Downloaded the drivers and looked about for an .inf file after extraction and there's nothing there in the way of that.

I'm revision 1.0 DS4.

Bit of a problem considering I have no floppy drive.
 
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