[Q] Stepping up to RAID?

[ExplodingBoy]

Until recently I had a single 45G hard drive; a small boot/apps partition and the rest for storage. Then I started running out of space. No problem, I picked up a second drive (40G) and slaved it to the first. Right now I have a single extended partition on it taking 100% of the space but this isn't really ideal. What I'd really like is my two partition system back ... 5-10G for boot/apps, 70G for storage, and maybe 5-10G to play around with alternate boot OS like linux or XP.

Any suggestions here? I'm not looking to spend a lot of money, and hopefully would like to avoid re-formatting the drives.

I suppose I could just use PM to make drive 0 into One Big Drive, but lately I'm wondering if Raid0 is worth considering.

 

[Double Trouble]

Raid 0 is worth considering, but if you plan to put your two drives in RAID 0 mode, you'll have to format them again. The raid controller must create an array on newly formatted drives.... it's a pain, but well worth it.

Keep in mind the implications of raid 0 -- mainly that if either one of your drives goes kaput, you lose all the information on both drives. Make sure you back up everything important.

Anand did a very nice review of RAID and a few raid cards not too long ago..... do a search

 

[Pabster]

If you are serious about RAID, don't bother with any IDE solution, hardware or software. SCSI is the only operating environment for a RAID configuration.

 

[ExplodingBoy]

pabster: hrm. raid0 might be a little to chancy for me; esp. with the seemingly high rate of failure for hdds I've seen. I'd do raid5 but then I'd be back to having only 45gigs of space.


I guess I'm not really serious about raid; I just want to make my two big drives into one big partition. It seems silly that I can't do that without risking catastrophic drive failure.

Very intersting post on /. about a < $5000 terabyte server (an athlon box w an array of 16 raid'ed IDE drives)

 

[Stark]

I've been running an ide raid 0 array for about a month now. No complaints. I have another drive that I store anything important on, so if the whole thing dies, I'm still ok.

 

[Pabster]

Well, of course SCSI drives have a far higher MTBF and generally a better warranty as well. They're built better and suited well to heavy tasks. I would not even consider IDE for a RAID solution. Sure, you can do it cheaper, but yes the drives do tend to fail easier and quicker, and the performance just isn't comparable to SCSI RAID in any flavor.

 

[Shooters]

I'd do raid5 but then I'd be back to having only 45gigs of space.

You need a minimum of three drives to do RAID 5, so you would need to buy one more drive and a card that supports RAID 5. That's when things get pricey.