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Mirroring With IDE Drives

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owensdj

Golden Member
I'm thinking about using IDE rather than SCSI drives for a light-duty(3-5 client) Win2K Server machine because of the high cost of SCSI hard drives. I'd probably use 2 of those new 8MB cache 120GB Western Digital IDE drives in a software mirror(RAID 1) set. I know there would be performance problems if I put both of them on the primary IDE channel. If I put the 2nd drive on the secondary channel, I'd have to use a 5.25" mounting kit to put the drive above the IDE CD-ROM.

Any thoughts on how best to use mirroring with IDE drive?
 
For best performance you could use a hardware raid-1 controller. Otherwise software raid-1 mirror would be fine for such light duty.
 
owensdj - Have you used software mirroring before using Win2K instead of a third party solution?
Im curious as ive always used third party solutions such as Promise and 3Ware in the past but have always been curious as to how reliable recovering from a broken mirror using Win2K to do the job would be? Notifications?
If your proposed way of doing this is reliable i am thinking that buying a simple ATA controller for the CD drives be cheap and like you say just pop the HD's on IDE 1 and 2.
It seems a waste of money to buy the third party solutions which are expensive if you are not going to be trying striping.
Please let us know your experiences when you give it a try as it'd be interesting to see if this is a viable solution to the third party offerings.

thanx,

rockhard =)
 
I think owensdj wants to use the Win2K Server feature where you can software mirror using Win2K Servers Disk Administrator's Volume mirroring which can be used as a bootable volume 🙂
Kinda like ghosting continually without the hassle.
Seems a shame to ghost once a week when Win2k server can do it continually for you.
I just wish Win2k Prof and XP Prof had the servers ability to do mirroring from Disk Administrator, then i could forget about the expense of a third party soution and just get a cheapo ATA controller for the CD's.
Im just waiting for some feedback on this from owensdj on how it performs before i take the plunge and ditch my raid controller and give this a go 🙂
 


<< Seems a shame to ghost once a week when Win2k server can do it continually for you >>



That continual ghosting will also slow down your system... Doesn't seem much of a shame if your server needs to be as fast as can be but can still afford to be down 2 hours on an offpeak/no traffic time period to me.
 
I remembered a while back someone went to all the trouble of checking the CPU usage of both addin cards and Win2K's own software mirroring/striping and i was very surprised to see there was only a few single figure percent difference between the two! 🙂
The cheaper boards on the IDE side of things are not much better than standard software raiding IMO FWIW 😉
Maybe the added monitoring software is what could justify the addon cards in my eyes but am wondering if you could use Event Viewer Notification to tell you when your array gets fubored? If you can then im kinda warming to what owensdj is thinking of doing 🙂
Maybe the migher end cards like the ones put out by 3Ware and Promise have the props but theyre hella expensive for simple mirroring 🙁
 
rockhard, I've never had to rebuild a mirror set on NT4/2K Server, but software RAID 1(mirroring) on NT4/2K Server seems to work well and reliably. Rebuilding the mirror set if the primary drive fails isn't as automatic as with a hardware RAID solution, but how often does that happen? You have to make the secondary drive the primary drive, and then I think you have to boot from the Server install CD or floppy and do a Repair on the Boot Sector to make this drive bootable, then you can rebuild the mirror set with a new hard drive.

For simple mirroring, I'd definately stick to using the built-in software RAID of NT4/2K Server. When you want to have 4 IDE drives in a RAID 5 stripe set, then you're talking hardware RAID card.
 
what_is_raid
"RAID-1
RAID Level 1 provides redundancy by writing all data to two or more drives. The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost. This is a good entry-level redundant system, since only two drives are required; however, since one drive is used to store a duplicate of the data, the cost per megabyte is high. This level is commonly referred to as mirroring."

"RAID-1 is the array of choice for performance-critical, fault-tolerant environments. In addition, RAID-1 is the only choice for fault-tolerance if no more than two drives are desired. "

raidtoolbox
"Mirror, Mirror
RAID-1 is better known as "disk mirroring". "Disk mirroring" is simply a pair of disk drives that store duplicate data, but appears to the computer as a single drive. Writes must go to both drives in a mirrored pair so that the information on the drives is kept identical. Each individual drive, however, can perform simultaneous read operations. Mirroring thus doubles the read performance of an individual drive and leaves the write performance unchanged. RAID-1 delivers the best performance of any redundant array, especially in multi-user environments."

chris,
If at ALL possible with servers you NEVER want to power them off like your suggesting. Everytime a server reboots/shutsdown you have the potential for major problems.(disk won't power up again, software initialization errors, the list goes on and on)

Besides that how long do you plan on ghosting the system every week? 1month? 2months? would you want to do that every week for 2years? 3years? Your idea is certainly creative, but not well thought out in the long run.
 
owensdj - thanx for the tips on recovery.
I think i'll give that a try on one of my VM's and try it out first to aquaint myself with doing the Bootsector repair from the console as its been a while since i last did that.
How do you know when one of your drives has gone out?
Barring sniffing over the Event logs you could be sitting there for years with one drive dead and you'd never know unless you went looking, yeah?
 
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