A few questions on onboard ide and pci raid card setup

[arrgon]

Whats the best way to set up a dvdrw, dvdrom, cdrw, zip drive, a main boot drive, and two identical storage drives over integrated ide and a pci ide raid card?

Currently it is set up as follows:
primary master: boot hdd
primary slave: dvd rom
secondary master: dvdrw
secondary slave: cdrw

raid channel 1 master: hdd
raid channel 1 slave: zip drive (doesn't work like this, must've screwed up the jumpers)
raid channel 2 master: hdd
raid channel 2 slave: none

1. What would give best performance?
2. What would bring the least problems?
3. If I put the 2 storage hard drives on a single channel would i get a performance drop?
4. Currently the storage drives are in raid 0 and hold no important data, just video files and cd images, should i stay with raid 0?

Thanks

 

[mage333]

Some answers:
1. Depends.
2. I like my channels filled, with both drives on one cable. That's one less cable cluttering up the case restricting airflow. Also I've had problems with un-terminated cables. If you decide to put only one drive on each channel, invest in some single connector cables.
3. My friend "Bert" used to put each of his drives on seperate channels. When he got two more drives, he kept half the volume on each channel. He swears by the HDTach score, but I found the real world performance difference negligible. He does a lot more video encoding than I do though.
4. RAID 0 is used to have one big volume instead of two smaller ones, with a side effect being increased throughput. RAID 1 is used to backup and restore important information on a second drive. It's a trade-off. The question is: How valuable is your data, and *knock on wood* what would happen if you lost it? Is it easily replaceable, etc?

Some questions:
1) What do are you planning to use the RAID array for?
2) What raid card (and chips), and motherboard are you using?

Be aware, many low-end IDE and SATA RAID controllers are actually software RAID implemented in the drivers. These can use up to 40-50% of your CPU power on write requests depending on your configuration. A proper hardware RAID card will have among other things: a dedicated XOR chip, and onboard cache memory. Depending on your motherboard, RAID performance can also be affected by PCI bus speeds. I hope your RAID experience will be as fun and rewarding as mine.

 

[arrgon]

As I've said the hard drives store no important data, just video recodings from a tv tuner, dvd backups etc. which i later encode to mpeg2 and dump on a dvd. The raid card is a cheapie, and I'm well aware of the software/hardware raid card differences. However, I only got it when i needed another hard drive, and the raid function just seemed as a bonus, so i figured "why not?". It's currently running raid 0, and for multi-gigabyte uncompressed video files i have definitely noticed a performance improvement, if only marginal.
I don't plan on investing hundreds of dollars into a proper raid setup, and i'm just wondering how to best make use of what i have.

Thanks

 

[airfoil]

You have too many IDE drives! I'm not sure why you need a DVDRW and a CDRW, when you already have the DVD ROM as the 2nd optical drive. Lose the CDRW.

Then, set it up like this:

primary master: Boot HDD
primary slave: none
secondary master: DVDRW
secondary slave: Zip drive

raid channel 1 master: HDD
raid channel 1 slave:
raid channel 2 master: HDD
raid channel 2 slave: DVD-ROM

If you can lose the zip drive, that'll be good too - put the DVD ROM on the primary IDE as slave and keep the RAID card with just the 2 HDDs for optimum performance.

In a lighter vein, next time around, buy SATA!