IDE RAID 0 Question VS 10K rpm SCSI ???

[Submit]

I have an Asus A7V-133 board (w/ Promise Raid Controller integrated) At the moment I have two different hd's(not set up in RAID). I was considering purchasing another hd, exactly the same as one of my current hd's. I know that I will need to reinstall the os and everything else. I was thinking that maybe it I make a Norton Ghost image of the system disk and store it on the hd that will not be in the RAID array, I would be able to install from the image (stored on the third hd) onto the two drives in the RAID 0 array.

Is this possible? is there any way to get around reinstalling everything from scratch? As I don't have some of the setup files to some of my software.

Thanks

 

[office boy]

Tried it, didn't work.

 

[MichaelD]

Uh, yes it can and DOES work. I did this same thing. Well, kinda. You need to put everything you want to keep, including the OS on one of the HD that wonn't be part of the raid array.

Make a Norton boot floppy.

Hook up your new HD and one of the old ones (the one w/o all the info on it) to the Raid controllers. One HD to each channel.

Create the RAID array in BIOS. Set stripe size. I use 64. Your mileage may differ.

Boot from the NOrton floppy. Copy Local->to->disk. It'll have you click the source (your one HD) and the destination it'll show just one drive because your raid array IS ONE DRIVE.

CLICK ok. That's it. It took about 20 minutes to copy a 18 GB image from one HD to the raid array. It copied everything down to the last bit. I ran scan disk and registry check on the array immediately afterwards. I had a couple of registry errors with my games, but Norton fixed them itself. Everything works perfectly. **You can do it!**

 

[office boy]

Well, I guess I better try again then eh?
Truthfully I didn't try that hard to make it work, since I like to reinstall every 6 months or so anyway.

When I tried it, ghost just wrote everything to one drive, and it would not boot in raid.

 

[zixxer]

It does work, however, I would recommend setting up a fast 7200 rpm drive as your main drive, and raiding the two as a 'programs' drive if you are striping. However, what I do is use Raid 5 which uses 3 drives, one as a parity drive.

 

[Submit]

MichaelD, did you notice a increase in read and write speed and overall system performance?

According to Anandtech recent article on IDE RAID p23

"We found that the fastest card was the Iwill SIDE RAID100, powered by the Highpoint HPT370A. Every RAID 0 array tested was able to outperform the single IDE drive, and in the case of the SIDE RAID100 it was able to do so by a good 13%. The next fastest card, the FastTrak100 and its Promise PDC20267, outperformed the IDE drive by 12%, as did the AMI MG80649 powered MegaRAID 100. The Adaptec hardware RAID card, the AAA-UDMA, performed 5% faster than the pure IDE drive. Finally, the Promise SuperTrak100 hardware RAID card outperformed the IDE drive by 3%. "


In my case 12% is what I should expect. What is your opinion of the RAID 0 performace?

Thanks

 

[Boobers]

DOH! - Double Post

 

[Boobers]

I have an IWill KK266, and have run at both RAID0 and RAID1. IMHO, neither are what they are cracked up to be.

For one, if you use RAID0 and one drive fails, you loose the whole array. This cuts your reliability in half. For two, you won't see any difference when you use the array vs a single hard drive. Benchmarks are all well and good, but I have been ripping DVD's to VCD's and it still takes hours to perform the task and I suspect that a sequential write to a single drive may be faster or at least the same speed.

And as for RAID1, I see no real gain in security or reliability there, either. So, I have 2 copies of my hard drive, a virus comes in and destroys both drives at once. Some security. You erase something by accident, but it automatically erases it from both drives at once. The only security it provides is if one of the drives actually fails. Then you can rebuild the array from the good drive. This is only a mechanical fail-safe and no real data protection. I don't know about you, but I end up upgrading my drives to larger/faster ones before they fail, anyway. Most drives today are cheap and reliable.

This brings me to my current situation: Seperate the drives (no array) and use one drive for OS (one partition, the rest a data partition). The other drive is one big partition, used for data and real backup files (or drive images). I use Backup Exec - Desktop 98. Ghost must be something similar. I also like Desktop 98's ability to boot with a floppy and install backups to a blank HD from CDR. This works for me...

 

[Submit]

Maybe I'll hold of on buying anther IDE drive and setting up an IDE RAID array.

Off the RAID topic, but anyone using one of those 10k rmp SCSI drives ? How would the performace of one of those rate vs IDE RAID 0 ?