Raid 0 Questions

[Breezie]

ok i know it's probably been discussed before but I'm planning on building a new computer tuesday and would like some input on Raid Striping.

I have two Maxtor Ultra Series 160gb harddrives (ata133/8mb cache)- u know, the ones that are always on sale lately- and have the MSI Neo 2 with a built in ide Raid promise thingy.

-what are the chances of my harddrives screwing up?

-if they do begin to screw up- will my motherboard/computer alert me so I can take measures to either back up my files or fix the problem before its too late?

-I've had one of the 160gb for about 4-5 months now and bought the second one last week, is it better to make the new one master and the old one slave?

I'm just worried about if its worth the risk to raid my harddrives because I certainly don't want to lose my files if something goes wrong. I've heard the newer harddrives (like the maxtor i have) are a lot better then the harddrives back in the day and therefore have low chances of F***ing up on me...

 

[beatle]

-what are the chances of my harddrives screwing up?

Just as likely as they were before, but now your chance of losing data is twice as likely to happen.

-if they do begin to screw up- will my motherboard/computer alert me so I can take measures to either back up my files or fix the problem before its too late?

Possibly, if you run a scandisk and detect errors, but otherwise it's just like having one harddrive. Sometimes there are warnings, sometimes there aren't.

-I've had one of the 160gb for about 4-5 months now and bought the second one last week, is it better to make the new one master and the old one slave?

It doesn't matter which is which.

I'm just worried about if its worth the risk to raid my harddrives because I certainly don't want to lose my files if something goes wrong. I've heard the newer harddrives (like the maxtor i have) are a lot better then the harddrives back in the day and therefore have low chances of F***ing up on me...

I didn't feel it was worth the risk (after I lost all my data due to a broken array). I thought it was fast at first, but I was also upgrading from an 18 gig drive to 40GB 60GXPs which were faster to begin with. When I went back to a single configuration, I didn't notice much of a difference in performance. Seek times are the same as a single drive, and that's what drives a big part of the "fast" feeling. If you choose to run RAID 0, always PLAN to lose your data. I back everything valueable up to another computer once a week. I'd rather someone call me paranoid than lose my data.

 

[Breezie]

thx for the feed back =)

"Just as likely as they were before, but now your chance of losing data is twice as likely to happen." - so when i have only one harddrive and it fails- the same thing happens to the raided two harddrives but just twice as much data (since its both harddrives failing instead of one), right?

oh another question:

Say if I do raid my two harddrives and one day say a month or two from now, the paranoia is eating away at me so much that I want to put them back on the regular IDE part of the motherboard- does this make me lose any files? Can I just turn off the raid from the bios? Will my computer just run normally without any software changes? or do I got to reinstall windows?

 

[biostud]

If you run raid 0 and one drive fail the data on both drives are lost, but the unbroken HDD is still functional. The reason why it is twice as large is because for HDD it might have 1 failure in a billion, with 2 drives you have 2x1 failure in a billion.

You'll need to backup all your data before doing an "un"-RAID, you cannot "keep" it on one drive.

 

[DaveSimmons]

just to make it clear, RAID 0 works by splitting files across both drives. So when you play a MP3 it is reading chunks of the file from disk 1...disk 2...disk 1....disk 2, etc.

So if disk 2 dies, you lose half of every file. If you move the drives back to a normal IDE controller you have 2 separate drives that each have useless file fragments that can't be read properly.