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Help me with RAID!

Y

Yzzim

Lifer
I'm building a new computer with these specs:

P4 2.4c
Abit IS7 (865PE chipset)
2x256 PC3500 DDR
Radeon 9800np

I'm going to get DSL soon (Qwest is finally getting with the program...) so it gives me a reason to ugprade. I have a 30 gig hdd right now and think I could use a boost in speed and storage.

The computer is primarily going to be used for games, dvd authoring/editing and smaller stuff like finances, web browsing, etc.

I've taken a look at Anand's IDE RAID Comparison but it is a little dated now (written in June 01) so things have probably changed.

So I guess my questions would be which RAID card should I use and which drives would be the best? I'm guessing RAID 0 is what I want since I'd like performance over reliability.

Also, would I be able to see an increase while playing games?

Thanks for the help!
 
I don't think that RAID will change much, so that FAQ is likely accurate yet. What bit I just scanned through appears accurate.

RAID 0 - improved seek, read and write performance. If one drive dies, you're screwed. 2+ drives
RAID 1 - redundancy, and a slight boost in read performance. 2+ drives
RAID 5 - redundancy and increased performance. Uses striping and parity. 3+ drives.


Gaming (RAID 0) - loading times (for the program itself, and for levels) will be quicker, but there'll be no impact on framerates.
 
master the 30, boot from it.

then set both the drives on the raid card to master, (though you'll want to boot from the regular IDE (30gig))

if you check out the promise website they have some good tips, like always boot from a nonraid drive,but keep you pagefile on the raid.

dont partition the raid...


get some drives with the 8 meg cache. (i've got 2 WD 80gig's with 8meg cache) they reach max read speeds of 85MB/s.

does that mobo have onboard raid? either onboard or a card is just fine, the only advantage to having it on a card is that if you lose you mobo you can tranfer it to another PC to get your data, where if you have it on mobo you would likely lose data (unless you went to an identical replacement mobo)

get your PC working, then add RAID. also read up on stripe sizes before you set it up, once you build the array, any changes to it, like strip size or raid type will require a reformating of everything.

one more thing to be aware of, RAID0 doesnt handle multiple writes well, so if you use DL programs (like kazaa) i would put the DL's on the 30 gig, then transfer them to RAID for storage.

hope this all helps/makes sense
 
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