Help on Raid 0: to follow my last post /

[ruud]

Dear all,

first thank you for you help (in trying to find a solution for transfering my active partition to a new Raid 0 configuration). It does not seem to be very simple but I will try a risky transfer.

But I discover something really worrying : it seems by reading your answers that making a back-up image from a Raid 0 tray on which the OS is located is not possible.

I have Norton Ghost but ghosting the Raid 0 appears not be possible!

And also there is distinction between hard vs. software Raid. How do I know that the Raid located on the MB is hard or soft?

The Supermicro has two possible Raid solutions : Intel ESB2 Sata controller and Adaptec HostRaid (so I assume that there is a specific piece of hardware on it dedicated to the RAID fonction).

Thank you for helping me again.

Kind regards,

Ruud

 

[somethingsketchy]

Originally posted by: ruud
And also there is distinction between hard vs. software Raid. How do I know that the Raid located on the MB is hard or soft?

If the you created the RAID array by plugging two or more SATA drives into the motherboard (but not to a RAID card) then you will have a software based RAID (since the motherboard and CPU will do all of the processing of the RAID). For a hardware based RAID array you connect your SATA drives to a RAID card which then takes the load of processing information between the drives off of the CPU for more performance.

For example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816116030
This is a hardware based RAID card (note it may or may not be a good example of a "great" RAID card, that is not what I'm shooting for here).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813128358
Software based RAID. Notice how in the specification page under "Storage" the motherboard will support 0/1/5/10 RAID configurations? Basically the motherboard will act as a "RAID card" and the CPU will do all of the processing of information being read and written to/from to the array of HDDs.

Long story short software based RAID is easier and cheaper since your are letting your motherboard/CPU act as the RAID controller card. The downside, of course, is if the integrated RAID controller on your motherboard craps out, then you lose the RAID (depending on what RAID you had at the time).

With hardware based RAID you can at least salvage the RAID array (depending on the RAID array level) if you have a matching RAID card. The downside to hardware based RAID is cost (depending on how many HDDs you will be connecting to the card), what brand name card you get (some cards go well above $300 on newegg) and what are the "minimum requirements" for each RAID level (although this applies to software-based RAID as well).

http://www.google.com/search?h...q=hardware+vs+software

The first link in the search covers basically what I have already said. Hope this helps you with the differences between software and hardware based RAID.

-somethingsketchy