How to do RAID 0 - Striping ?

[JohnnyMnemonic]

I am planning to get the GA-7VRXP and stripe the two 120 GB Western Digital disks that I have. However I have two questions.

(1) One of the 120 GB disks has a cache of 2 MB and the other has 8 MB. Does this matter if I raid them together.

(2) I have seen people warning against using any of the RAID disks (if you are using Raid 0) to store the OS. I have another WD 80 GB HD, could I use the third to run my OS off of and RAID the other two (120 GB) ? In this case which disk is Primary / Master ?

Is this possible ? Has anyone else done it ?

 

[hoihtah]

when you stripe0, you basically get the speed of the lowest common denominator... multiplied by (theoretically) the number of drives.

meaning... with 2mb and 8mb cache... you're not getting 5mb speed.
rather you'll be getting the speed of 2mb...
meaning the speed of 2x 2mb drives.

and there's a great deal of performance lost right there.

i don't know if i would raid these two drives together.
especially since 8mb 120gb has such fast speed to begin with.

---------------------------------
question 2.
i'm not sure whether you are asking for partition info or ide drive assignment.

if you are serious about performance gain, you should set everything to master on the ide port.
if you need more ide ports... get ide / raid card.

as for setting drives' partitions... do set your os drive as primary partition.
and other two as primary partion as well.

 

[Beau]

1) no

2) yes, You'll run the stripe off of channels 3 master and 4 master and put your 80 on channel-1 as the master.

 

[Rakkis]

If you have a reason to use RAID 0, be sure to back up files. It's the least reliable RAID as far as data integrity goes.

The point of having the OS in a non-RAIDed disc is to be able to use the machine should one of the RAIDed discs go bad.... so I would use the separate disc as a primary master