A few questions about Raid

[blackrain]

I have never set up a RAID before. I have done some homework on it, but a few things still aren't clear to me so sorry about the newbie questions.

I have the following setup for office use and gaming:

MSI 785GT-E63
2x ST3120026AS 120GB drives
Windows 7

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST3120.../dp/B0000A576B

I would like to do a RAID0 array for improved performance. Is it worth it or not? Am I going to see a difference? Is the difference even noticeable?

As far as setup/installation, should I do the RAID through the BIOS or through windows? Is it straightforward? From what I have read, if I do it through the BIOS, all I need to do is specify the drives under the RAID BIOS settings, and then boot off the windows 7 disk to install windows 7. If I understand correctly, Windows 7 should automatically recognize my RAID0 array based on my BIOS settings.

Any suggestions about BIOS settings or anything else that hasn't been mentioned?

Note that I will have an external drive for backups.

 

[BoT]

yes it will work. performance will improve and you will notice a difference. not tremendous but noticable.

i'd recommend to set it up through BIOS.
it's fairly straight forward depending on your raid controller provider/ manufacturer
yes you will have to reinstall the OS. windows has good driver support and hopefully detects a usable driver for your raid setuo, if not you can still install raid drivers during install. make sure you have the correct drivers available before you nuke your good install
go with all the default settings to begin with and you should be cruising through this new setup.
one thing to keep in mind, with raid0 you basically double your systems failure rate.
make good back ups, not to any of the raid drives, and make them a habit. the more the merrier.

good luck

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The difference will be fairly small. Given your workload, I'm not sure whether you will even notice it or not - if you did more large sequential writes, it would be a lot more noticeable.

 

[FishAk]

What am I missing here? The link you posted is for a 120GB spinning disk for $175. This 6-year old drive is refurbished- for $175? This is for ignorant people who think they need to replace their original equipment with an identical product. I can think of no other reason to justify this price. It would be silly to RAID 0 two of these disks when you could buy one Momentus XT hybrid 500GB drive for $130 and beat the proposed RAID array in both speed and capacity with less cost, risk, heat, power consumption, space, and effort. Better yet would be an SSD. The best would be to wait a few months for the third generation SSDs to get shipped, and buy a couple Gen. 2 SSDs at half price. If you can't wait, consider buying the hybrid now, and get an SSD later. Whatever you do, don't buy any 120GB spinning drives for more than $5 or $6. You could buy a 1TB WD Caviar Black for about $80, and it would perform as good as two of those 120GB disks in RAID 0, with 4 time the capacity- all on one disk. The Caviar Black disks are great if you don't RAID them.


You don't need to do a fresh install if you have a good one on disk now. There is no reason to not simply clone to the new drive and then set the alignment if it's out of line. You only need to do a fresh install if you don't have a good one already- and then you need a fresh one regardless of whether you are changing drives.


I don't know if you could build an array on top of an existing W7 OS install. Depending on the RAID method, it might be possible. Since you shouldn't even consider using Windows softRAID, that's not an issue, and the array will be built in BIOS. Once its' built, I would certainly try sticking an image on it. What's there to loose but a little time? The worst that could happen is you would need to start W7 fresh. It seams like it wouldn't work, only if the array is managed in part by Windows, but I have no experience here.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Maybe he already has the drives?

 

[blackrain]

Maybe he already has the drives?

Exactly.

 

[blackrain]

The difference will be fairly small. Given your workload, I'm not sure whether you will even notice it or not - if you did more large sequential writes, it would be a lot more noticeable.

Given the increased probability of failure, is it even worth it if I am not likely to see a noticeable difference? I can't seem to find a consistent view on whether the difference will be worth it.

 

[Nothinman]

Given the increased probability of failure, is it even worth it if I am not likely to see a noticeable difference? I can't seem to find a consistent view on whether the difference will be worth it.

That's the big question and the answer is entirely up to you. Some people swear by it, but I personally wouldn't risk it. I just replaced a dead drive a few months ago with a RAID1 because I lost some data and am thinking about converting the rest of my filesystems to RAID1 as well.

 

[FishAk]

Speaking of ignorant, how did I miss the fact that you already had the drives?


Still, rather than putting a couple older disks in RAID 0, and taking the chance one might fail, perhaps it makes sense to just toss out those drives, and buying a Caviar Black, or an F3, if you need more speed without spending too much. They would be faster than putting those disks in RAID 0, and would give you some stretching room too. If you have room, and extra ports, you could keep the old drives for backup duty. But at $0.10/GB, those drives aren't worth a whole lot now, and you probably wouldn't feel too bad for retiring them. You would feel much worse if you lost data to them.

 

[Old Hippie]

I can't seem to find a consistent view on whether the difference will be worth it.

Because "worth it" is subjective....what do you expect?

 

[corkyg]

That's the big question and the answer is entirely up to you. Some people swear by it, but I personally wouldn't risk it. I just replaced a dead drive a few months ago with a RAID1 because I lost some data and am thinking about converting the rest of my filesystems to RAID1 as well.

This! I have already made a RAID1 array my data drive. And, that array is further backed up weekly to an external drive.

 

[blackrain]

Thoughts on motherboard RAID controller reliability? (For RAID 0 or RAID 1)

 

[Nothinman]

Thoughts on motherboard RAID controller reliability? (For RAID 0 or RAID 1)

I know lots of people like them, but I sure as hell wouldn't trust my data to one of them.

 

[sub.mesa]

Thoughts on motherboard RAID controller reliability? (For RAID 0 or RAID 1)

Reliability should not matter, when you have a proper backup.

Likewise, the minor differences in drive reliability are also irrelevant. You do not want to lose precious data, period. So make sure that you don't. You do that with a backup; buy an external 2TB drive for under 100 euro and keep it disconnected when not in use. Simple, cheap and very effective.

That also means you can use RAID0 and such at your leisure. If you have Intel ICHxR controller you also can enable "Write Caching" which gives a nice speed boost in realistic workloads (mixed read/write) - though it puts your filesystem at risk of corruption, having a good backup would negate that risk.

 

[Mark R]

Thoughts on motherboard RAID controller reliability? (For RAID 0 or RAID 1)

Bad enough to prefer no RAID for my systems, over motherboard RAID-1.

Of course, I keep regular backups, onto a good quality NAS with RAID. So I'm not worried about data loss.

But what I am worried about is having systems unusable or unbootable, because a drive (e.g. system drive) fails - because even with good backups, it's often quite an arduous process to restore.

 

[FishAk]

But what I am worried about is having systems unusable or unbootable, because a drive (e.g. system drive) fails - because even with good backups, it's often quite an arduous process to restore.

It's not arduous at all. There's several good and free image programs to chose from, and if you image your OS/Program drive, its a simple matter to restore it to another drive, or your repaired array. The trick is to keep good images. To make sure they don't get messed up, you should make a smallish partition all the way on the inside edge of your spinning disk(s) just for images. This is the slowest part of a HDD, and is a good place to park them. Then set your defrag tool to leave that image partition alone. In order to ensure images stay valid, they need to be originals, and you can't move them or defrag them. For this reason, I don't think an SSD is a good place to store images.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Bad enough to prefer no RAID for my systems, over motherboard RAID-1.

True, that. ICH10 raid is an absolute pain in the ass, it tried to recover after every reboot, every system change, if you even sneeze at the computer it seems to want to do a check next startup. And then for all that for some reason it wasn't recognized by Windows on a reinstall and ended up destroying the raid and screwing up my computer.

 

[blackrain]

I have an external backup and use imaging software. However, because my schedule is so busy, I am not very diligent about doing regular backups.

Raid 0 sounded interesting because I would love to have a performance boost.

Raid 1 sounded appealing because it would be great to have a backup that is ready to go (i.e., if one of the drives dies, the other one will presumably boot up with everything intact and up-to-date). No need to take the time to restore an image, worry about losing files that weren't backed up since the last backup, reinstall, etc

I guess I will go with the Raid 1

 

[mv2devnull]

Raid 1 sounded appealing because it would be great to have a backup that is ready to go ...

IMO "backup" is not the right word. To me "backup" implies something, from which you can restore lost files.

RAID1 is not about that. It is about not losing files when a hard-drive fails. Subtle difference. The files are stored on Raid array. The component disks of the array can break and be replaced without affecting the contents of the array. Redundant Array ...

And rAID 0 is worse than single disk in the redundancy scale.


But yes, RAID 1 is the kind of convenience that you did describe.

 

[allthatisman]

You may want to check out this site and forum specifically:

http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/

There are a lot of threads that address your questions, including short stroking for added performance. That really doesn't apply to you since your drives are pretty low on the capacity side.

I recently added another one of these for a short stroked(300gb partition) RAID-0 setup:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-395-_-Product

Single platter, 500gb drives that are quite fast the way I have them setup, and both were just under $110 shipped +tax. I have done the SSD thing, and thus far, this setup is best of ALL worlds - speed, capacity, and price. 300gb is all I need, but you can always go even farther if you want faster access times, and more consistant read averages. I can post a screenshot of my HDTune when I get home later if you would like.

 

[FishAk]

IMO "backup" is not the right word. To me "backup" implies something, from which you can restore lost files.

RAID1 is not about that. It is about not losing files when a hard-drive fails. Subtle difference. The files are stored on Raid array. The component disks of the array can break and be replaced without affecting the contents of the array. Redundant Array ...

And rAID 0 is worse than single disk in the redundancy scale.


But yes, RAID 1 is the kind of convenience that you did describe.

Exactly.


RAID 1, nor any other form can be considered a backup. It only protects from a broken drive. There are many reasons for the loss of data that have nothing to do with a broken drive. When you build an array- even a simple RAID 1 array- you can protect data from one type of data loss, but you also introduce new reasons for data loss, on top of the preexisting ones. It can't be stressed enough that a RAID array is not backup.

 

[FishAk]

However, because my schedule is so busy, I am not very diligent about doing regular backups.

Proper backups can be made automatically in the background; you only have to set it up. However, when you use frequent automatic backups, you also need to keep another backup set that you update less frequently- like once a month or even longer. It's easy to have something go wrong with the auto backup, and you can save most of your precious stuff by having a backup that only gets updated when you know the automatic, frequently updated one is valid. Drives are cheap, some data is simply not replaceable.

 

[pjkenned]

Just wondering, how old are the 120GB drives? Raid 0 with older drives (that are getting closer to the end of their natural lifespan) scares me a bit.

 

[BoT]

i'd recommend getting a spare drive and do daily image back ups