RAID 0 in WinXP vs. add-on IDE RAID 0

[lorlabnew]

Have a question regarding use of striped volumes in WinXP.

I've been reading the articles about the IDE "software" RAID controllers built-in some motherboards, as well as cheaper RAID add-on PCI controllers (Promise FastTrak TX2, IWILL SideRaid 100, Highpoint370 etc.). From what I understand is that those are only slightly modified regular IDE controllers, and the RAID computation is done on system main CPU anyway.

Isn't the striped volume set feature in WinXP Pro pretty much the same thing then? Are there any comparisons available somewhere?

Now I use single drive with NTFS; I'd like to add second identical 7200rpm drive and implement parts of 2 drives into the striped volume formatted FAT32 (to get faster drive access), while keeping OS & data files on basic NTFS volumes; would I see a difference in performance? Particularly I'd like to put swap file on, as well as some apps and games (these are getting huge today, and the large textures need always to be loaded- that's why RAID).

I'm considering to get FastTrak in the future, but don't want to shell out $100+ right now if I could do the same or very similar thing without. I don't need the extra IDE ports (which would be the benefit of buying FastTrak) at this moment, since my built-in IDE would accomodate 2xHDD (both as masters) and 2xCDROM&CDRW (both as slaves).

Thx for ideas.

 

[muttley]

First off in XP home and XP pro there is no software RAID this will be only in the server line.
Second the master boot record is not in software raid so it is better to get a card or built into a board so the info is on the drive.
Iwill side raid is $45.
Some of your other questions depend on the size of your drives where in fat 32 a sector may be 32k in size for every file that may only be of 1K (ie a text file)
ntsf has a few features for better error protection and repairing itself.

 

[mschell]

Sorry Muttley,
WinXP pro allows the creation of dynamic disk which make the RAID array. It's not well documented but it's done the same way as in Win2K pro. Been there and done it and it seems to work as well as any onboard or PCI card soluution I've tried. One limitation is the OS can't boot from a dynamic drive so the array can only be for apps and data.
One swap file on a RAID array is a bad idea because hits to the paging file are generally small files that need quick access times. RAID setups can have slower access times depending on the stripe/cluster sizes used.
It is a good idea to put a page file on every system drive (not partition). The reason is while heads on C: are reading or writing data, the heads on D: can be reading or writing to the page file which is always in use in WinXP regaurdless of RAM amount. The OS knows to use the page file drive that can be accessed the fastest
Tom's Hardware Guide did a comparison between W2K Pro software RAID and add in controllers, look for it in the Storage Guide section on the site.

 

[lorlabnew]

Thx for help, guys,
I'm going to check Tom's Hardware article for performance comparisons.

I actually tried to set it up yesterday, but the second drive (brand new IBM I bought for that purpose) turned out to be bad, so I decided not to complete the conversion into dynamics discs & volumes.
Interesting thing about swap file NOT to be located on the striped (RAID 0)volume ...

While messing up with partitions, I was running WinMark99 tests on both drives, for both NTFS and FAT32 comparable partitions; FAT32 with default cluster size 16kb turned out to be about 15-20% faster then identical NTFS partition with 4kb cluster. Then when I converted NTFS back to FAT32 (defaulting to 512 byte clusters, oops), the results were way the worst.

Anyway, thx for info again.