I have the opportunity to get three more drives, for cheap (well, less that $300), to match the 80GB that I have so that I can set up a RAID. While I had considered just getting one more for a RAID 0, I'm a bit chicken on that front and decided that the security of a RAID 0+1 might be worth the extra money.
I've done my homework on the subject, but I'm really curious as to the real-world performance advantage that I might get from such a RAID setup. In theory, I should get the read/write improvements of a RAID 0, as well as the read improvement of a RAID 1 (along with the write degradation). I get the feeling that any numbers that I may have read were a lot more ideal than I can provide....
For reference, my hard disks are currently each occupying their own channel on my motherboard's Highpoint 372 RAID controller, in JBOD mode. One disk holds OSes (Win2k and WinXP and Linux, eventually), while the other has media files, documents, and some temporary files. My opticals are each by themselves on the regular IDE channels.
If I set up the RAID 0+1, the four RAID disks would be on the two channels of the HPT372, of course, and I would probably put my existing 60GB drive by itself on a standard IDE channel, leaving the opticals together on the remaining. While I'd boot from the 60GB, the OSes and data would all reside on the RAID.
Are there any problems with this possible setup?
Am I going to see a performance increase with such a setup, even with drives sharing IDE channels? While it's not going to be a cost-effective performance increase, I'm not going to bother shelling out if I'm not getting anything.
Might I experience performance issues elsewhere from the setup? For example, I read somewhere that the particular controller that I have does some of its work with the processor (that is, it is not a pure hardware RAID), although I haven't yet researched this assertion.
Other than my in my pocketbook, are there any disadvantages to this setup that I would (or should) notice?
Thanks in advance for your replies!
I've done my homework on the subject, but I'm really curious as to the real-world performance advantage that I might get from such a RAID setup. In theory, I should get the read/write improvements of a RAID 0, as well as the read improvement of a RAID 1 (along with the write degradation). I get the feeling that any numbers that I may have read were a lot more ideal than I can provide....
For reference, my hard disks are currently each occupying their own channel on my motherboard's Highpoint 372 RAID controller, in JBOD mode. One disk holds OSes (Win2k and WinXP and Linux, eventually), while the other has media files, documents, and some temporary files. My opticals are each by themselves on the regular IDE channels.
If I set up the RAID 0+1, the four RAID disks would be on the two channels of the HPT372, of course, and I would probably put my existing 60GB drive by itself on a standard IDE channel, leaving the opticals together on the remaining. While I'd boot from the 60GB, the OSes and data would all reside on the RAID.
Are there any problems with this possible setup?
Am I going to see a performance increase with such a setup, even with drives sharing IDE channels? While it's not going to be a cost-effective performance increase, I'm not going to bother shelling out if I'm not getting anything.
Might I experience performance issues elsewhere from the setup? For example, I read somewhere that the particular controller that I have does some of its work with the processor (that is, it is not a pure hardware RAID), although I haven't yet researched this assertion.
Other than my in my pocketbook, are there any disadvantages to this setup that I would (or should) notice?
Thanks in advance for your replies!
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