A few questions for you tech-heads on IDE RAID setup

[CraigD]

OK I figure this is the best place to ask a few newbie questions about IDE RAID that have been really bugging me...I'm considering upgrading my storage to a RAID 0 setup to increase the overall speed of my system when dealing with large files.

1. Is it possible to set up partitions on a IDE RAID 0 setup? eg.Two 40Gb drives = 80Gb but have two logical drives of 10Gb and 70Gb.

2. I plan to use the RAID 0 set up to increase the speed of dealing with medium to large files (15-600Mb). What is the best striping size to use?

3. If my OS (win2k) is installed on the RAID drives and I intend to have a 'medium to large' striping size (500Kb-8Mb) will I see a speed increase or decrease in the general speed of the system?

4. In this case do you think it is worth spending the money to buy a PCI IDE ATA100 RAID card and 2 new IDE ATA100 HDD?? Will the increase in speed justify the cost?

Thanks for any advice

Craig.
Melbourne, Australia.

 

[MichaelD]

Hi Craig and welcome to the AT Forums!

You will get widely varying responses to your question. When dealing with YOUR money, the question should always be "is it worth it to you?"

I just recently went with an IDE 2-drive RAID 0 setup myself. I run Win98SE, so can't speak on W2K performance. I would imagine if anything, it would be slightly faster than Win98 though.

RAID 0 excells at transferring large amounts of info but is also faster, period, even when transferring small files.

I use the onboard RAID controller on my Abit KT7R mobo. It's essentially a software controller as opposed to a dedicated hardware card. I assume you're planning on getting a software RAID card (about $75 or so) as opposed to a true Hardware RAID card (about $300) right? That'll be just fine.

I use a 64kb stripe size, because that's the highest that the onboard Highpoint RAID controller will go. I think that add-on PCI raid cards go higher though. I've read that 64 or 128 are nice middle-of-the-road stripe sizes to use. What you prolly wanna do is experiment. Create the RAID array, put your OS and files on the drive using the 64kb stripe size. Run HDtach and SANDRA. Then reformat using the 128kb stripe size, run the same tests and compare. I did this using 32 and 64kb stripe sizes. The 64kb size perfomed a bit better, so I kept it. This is really the only way to find out.

Many will say that unless you are doing video editing, compiling, or recording huge audio files that raid is a waste. Well, I'm mainly a gamer and I think raid is great. The games open up a bit faster and level load-time has been cut by a third. It's worth it to me.

Hope this helps you!

 

[mrgibbysworth]

If you don't need to boot from the RAID you could save some $ and just use the software raid feature in win2k. I switched to it when my promise fastrack died. Same performance, the only advantage to software raid on a card is that you can boot from it.
I have actually found that using the raid for the boot/system drive to be a disapointment. For most things the system felt slower than without the raid. Also I lost everything when the raid card stopped working one day.
Now I use a cheap SCSI card and 4gb drive for the system and win2k's software raid for video space using the onboard IDE. I am much more satisfied with this setup.