got some general dumb questions about hard drives

[Anaconda]

i know these questions might seem newbie-ish to you, so here i go. What does an ATA100 card do? and what does "raid" mean and how do you do it?

 

[Jex]

ATA 100 is basically IDE with 100 Mbit channel. With an ATA 100 controller and ATA 100 harddrive you're supposed to be able to transfer data faster.

RAID is basically a way of making an array of disks for different purposed (depending on the mode). RAID 0 (known as striping) allows you to combine multiple disks into 1 partition. Such as 3 20GB drives into 1 60 GB. This is supposed to increase performance by better utilizing the 100 Mbit channel.

There is also mirroring (RAID 2?) in which the same data is written to each drive for redundancy in case of a crash. Not to useful for a PC, but good for servers.

Those 2 are the basic types. There are others (like RAID 5) which is kinda like a combo of the others.

 

[Boonesmi]

actually i belive its raid 0 that is mirroring, but basically you explained it better then i could

 

[Boonesmi]

side note, if your motherboard has built in ata66 controller there is very little advantage switching to an ata100 addin card because even the fastest hard drives only transfer data at about 40mb/s which is well within the ability of the ata66 bus to handle

 

[Topochicho]

IDE raid = waste of your money and time
Ide raid is all software, it basically negates all the advantages of the raid idea.

SCSI raid is the only real raid to mess with, but it is expensive. Scsi does almost everything in hardware taking alot of load off the cpu, allows you to hot swap drives (one drive in your array dies, you can unplug the drive and replace it without ever turning off the machine. Plus ide only accesses one drive at a time on an idividual chain. Scsi can access all the drives at the same time.

raid 0 = striping
raid 1 = mirroring
raid 0,1 and raid 5 = mirroring and striping

 

[Boonesmi]

topochicho

sorry but i think your wrong.

you can get hardware based ide raid and raid 1 is stripe, raid 0 is mirror

 

[rommel]

mmmm...RAID is gooood....no RAID is baaaaaad...lol
just installed an promise fast trak 100 RAID controller....very happy i am....set up to stripe and its really a significant improvement in performance....really didnt expect i would be able to notice the difference but its a definate improvement ...now i am waiting for the new fast trak 100tx4 taht will ahve four channels...awsome stuff just do it for the heck of it you wont be dissapointed.

 

[Mikendi]

RAID 0 is Striping
RAID 1 is mirroring


You cannot stripe three drives on an IDE Raid setup. Everything has to be even. In single SCSI Raid you can stripe up to the channel's limit - 15 devices. If youstripe in IDE each drive needs it's own channel. Raid is very cool technology. Here is a good page:
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci214332,00.html

 

[rommel]

and no booth of you are wrong...there is hardware eide RAID and 0 =stripin...1 = mirroring....1+0 mirror/stripe

 

[Jex]

So what kind of RAID is on the Abit KT7A-RAID? All the setup and what not is before the os even loads, so is that hardware raid or software raid?

 

[Boonesmi]

my mistake
raid 1 mirror
raid 0 stripe

and the abit board supports both of them
stripe is for more speed and performance, mirroring is for safety

 

[Jex]

BTW, here's a link describing the different modes. Although the explainations aren't exceptionally clear, you get the idea.

 

[Boonesmi]

also the promise controllers/and hotpoint/etc that you find on motherboards are software based, if you want hardware based ide raid you will need to buy an add in card. and they arent very cheap.

 

[Anaconda]

i have a 30 gig quantum fireball plus AS. i plan on getting a maxtor 30 gig 7200rpm. so with raid i can form these two hard drives into one? and how would i go about doing that?

 

[Boonesmi]

anaconda it depends on if your motherboard has built in raid.

if it does then its very easy, if not then you need to buy a pci raid controller

 

[Jex]

Although they recommend all drives in a RAID array to be the same model, speed, size, etc, I've heard people have no problems mixing drives.

For my Abit KT7A-RAID there is a raid bios setup or something that you can get into right after the bios is processed. That's where you create the raid array. You tell it what disks you want to be in the array and what mode and it creates the array. If you're doing striping, then it combines the drive so by the time the os get's to load, it only sees 1 drive.

 

[Anaconda]

well i plan to get a new motherboard with built-in raid, so how would i go about doing it?

 

[Boonesmi]

also you can raid the two hard drives (even though they are different brands) you can even raid drives that are different sizes, but it is much better (faster) to use two identical drives

for example the raid will only be as fast as the slowest drive, also if you raid a 30gig drive with a 15 gig drive it will effectively make both of them 15gig

 

[Boonesmi]

they are all different but it explains how in the manual, basically you just hook them up to the ide raid controllers on the motherboard, then when you boot the pc you will be prompted to setup the raid array

 

[Anaconda]

on a side note, will the cache buffer size really determine the performance of a hard drive? mine has 128kb. i found others had 2mb.

 

[Anaconda]

bump

 

[Anaconda]

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