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Question about mixing RAID and non-RAID

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DeadSeaSquirrels

Senior member
I am looking into getting a mobo with onboard RAID. I was wondering is it possible for me to have a RAID 0 striping for 2-80gb drives, and then have other perhaps 40 gig drives that are not within the RAID setup, so that they just run like normal hard drives. If so, is it also possible to run a RAID 0 striping for say my OS harddrives, but then a RAID 1 mirroring for 2 other hard drives for video editing. By doing this instead of just RAID 0+1, I get to keep the capacity of the striped drives, but still have the added fault tolerance for the OS drives.
 
The short answer: yes and no. Any mobo with onboard RAID will also have regular IDE ports through the northbridge. (with the possible exception of the newest SATA boards) The thing to remember is to keep any non-RAID array drives off the IDE ports for the RAID controller.

For example, in my system, I have 4 IDE ports. 2 provided by the northbridge, and 2 by the RAID controller. I have 2 30GB IBM drives in RAID 0, 1 on each of the RAID controller's IDE ports. I also have a single 120GB WD drive attached to one of the northbridge ports. Any IDE CD-ROM drives you have also would go on the northbridge ports as the RAID controller won't play nice with them.

To address the issue of a striped array (RAID 0) running beside a mirrored array (RAID 1), but without using 0+1, I don't quite understand what you're trying to do. You say that you want to use RAID 0 for your OS drives and have fault tolerance. The best way to do that is 0+1, unless you get an expensive PCI controller to do RAID 5.
 
Well if I do RAID 0+1, then I'll need 4 - 80GB drives, for a total of 160GB usage (I have 2 80GB drives waiting to be used, which is why this example). Instead I'd rather just have 2 drives on RAID 1 mirroring for the OS (for fault tolerance), and that'll give me 80GB of space, and then 2 drives on RAID 0 striping giving me an additional 160GB, for a total of 240GB, instead of just 160GB. I really want my OS to be safe (and mostly I am doing RAID just to learn), but for pure data thoroughput I'd like to use the RAID 0 for video editing experimentation.

What Mobo are you running by the way. I am thinking of getting the
Abit KD7-VIA KT400 DDR 400 AGP 8X W/ATA 133 RAID USB 2.0

I want a board w/ RAID 0+1 capabilities and USB 2.0
 
If you want the OS safe, then 0+1 is your only option the way I'm seeing it. If the OS is on the R0 array, and then you setup a R1 array, there is no way that I'm aware of to just mirror the OS and nothing else. You either mirror the whole array or you don't. A better way to do it might be to run a R1 array for the OS, and seperately run a R0 array for applications and video editing since R0 will give you the speed advantage. This way you would have 80GB for the OS drive with data security, and 160GB with the speed for everything else.

I have an older, but great board in the Abit KT7A-RAID. For the type of setup you're talking about though, I would not get the KD7. A better choice would be something with the HPT-374 chip on it such as the Epox EP-8K9A3+. With the HPT-374 chip, you get 4 IDE ports on the RAID controller instead of just 2 on the KD7. This way you can have one drive on each IDE port instead of having to slave 2 of them, which would hinder performance.
 
Thanks for all the info, I do agree with the RAID controller...the other board I am looking at is:
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP SocketA VIA KT400 + 8235 3DDR ATA133 RAID
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra SocketA IEEE 1394 AGP 8x Audio/LAN ATX

which I think, both have 4 channels. I think those two boards have 4 RAID channels, and 2 normal IDE channels, and that would really be perfect. I could put my DVD/CD-RW drives on those IDE channels, and then all my HDs on the RAID stuff...I am looking at the ABit AT7-RAID also, but we'll have to see.
 
The Gigabyte would be a good, stable board, but I don't like the Promise RAID chip they use because you can't select the stripe size. With the Highpoint chip that the Epox and the Abit AT7 use, you can select from I think 2k to 256k stripe sizes so you can get the most performance out of your array. I'm using 128kb stripe on my RAID 0 setup, but a Promise controller locks you in at 64kb if I'm not mistaken.

Good luck with building the new system and Merry Christmas! 🙂
 
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