RAID Question

[FPSguy]

I have two Western Digital 120GB hard drives (one 8MB cache; one 2MB cache) sitting on a shelf and begging to be RAIDed. I don't want to spend $50 - $60 on a RAID card, though, so I was considering a Koutech card for around $20. I would have three goals for this setup, valued in this order:

1. It has to be stable and reliable (it cannot lose my data or fail to boot any more than a single hard drive would)
2. I would like to increase the boot time for Windows
3. It would be nice if programs and data generally loaded a bit faster

I am worried that the cheaper RAID cards might not be stable and that the boot time for Windows might not increase due to the time necessary to recognize the RAID, and so implementing a setup like this might not have much value for me.

Are my concerns misplaced or would I be better off without RAID under these conditions?

 

[Sheriff]

It's stable and uses the Silicon Image chipset

 

[Crism]

Choose.

RAID 0 - 160GB of space. Fastest of all RAID.
RAID 1 - 80GB of space. Slowest. Backs up all of the data onto the 2nd hard drive.

 

[FPSguy]

Originally posted by: Crism
Choose. RAID 0 - 160GB of space. Fastest of all RAID. RAID 1 - 80GB of space. Slowest. Backs up all of the data onto the 2nd hard drive.

To clarify, I am not going to do RAID 1. It's RAID 0 or nothing for me. As long as the risk of data loss and non-booting isn't materially different from a single hard drive, I am okay with the risk. I just don't want to go for speed and then find Windows doesn't boot any faster and on top of that I have materially enhanced my risk of losing data.

 

[Sheriff]

Windows won't necessarily boot faster as you have to wait for the RAIDAarray to read. It's when you are in Windows that the benefit comes about and I would never run anything without the assurance of some kind of backup.

 

[StraightPipe]

why raid? performance? or reliability?
raid 0 will make the HDD's 2 times faster (at best), but you will be limited by the 2mb drive.
raid 1 will make you have a back up drive, so if you lose one you can make a copy of it, but it can slow you slightly when writing.

1. It has to be stable and reliable (it cannot lose my data or fail to boot any more than a single hard drive would)
2. I would like to increase the boot time for Windows
3. It would be nice if programs and data generally loaded a bit faster

1. raid 0 is half as reliable as regualar HDD, if you lose 1 drive you lose contents of both! raid 1 is more reliabale than 1 HDD, if you lose one you can recopy it, but you only lose info if both drives die at same time.
2. why would you want to increase boot time? I am really hoping you meant decrease
raid 0 will decrease boot time if you load your os on it.

3. answered above (file swapping will be faster, but you are always limited by the slowest components. ie: the drive you are moving the info to.)



I dont know about the card, sorry.

 

[StraightPipe]

if raid 0 you really are 2 times as likely to lose the drive, just as likely, but you now have 2 drives linked and if you lose either one (lightning, old age, evil elves) then the info on both is gone.

speed should be much better

 

[jarich]

Originally posted by: FPSguy

Originally posted by: Crism
Choose. RAID 0 - 160GB of space. Fastest of all RAID. RAID 1 - 80GB of space. Slowest. Backs up all of the data onto the 2nd hard drive.

To clarify, I am not going to do RAID 1. It's RAID 0 or nothing for me. As long as the risk of data loss and non-booting isn't materially different from a single hard drive, I am okay with the risk. I just don't want to go for speed and then find Windows doesn't boot any faster and on top of that I have materially enhanced my risk of losing data.

With two drives, your odds of failure are double that of a single drive. Since you are running Raid 0, half the data is on each drive. If you lose one drive, you lose all the data.

Raid 0 will load programs faster, but you probably won't see a big difference unless you are manipulating large (gigabyte+ large) files.

Personally, I'd put the money in memory instead and let the OS cache the disk you have. I've used IDE raid systems as well as SCSI and there just instead a "visible" difference. Today's disks are pretty darn fast already.

 

[StraightPipe]

oh yeah, to start raid0 you will have to empty the drives.

if your main concern is just boot times, i would suggest a reformat.

if you do it will make you os boot the very minimum, and then you can add anything else you want.

last time I did the reformat it took me from 6-7 mins to 1:40.

 

[FPSguy]

Doh! I meant increase the boot speed of Windows -- decrease the boot time!

I guess I can accept twice the risk of a hard drive failure. I have never actually had one fail and have probably owned 15 or so drives, including one in a notebook that I dropped. I back up irregularly so the odds are good I will have a lot of my data backed up if a drive fails but there is nearly a 100% chance that I won't have all the data backed up.

Won't my odds of recoving data on a crashed drive go down with RAID as well? With a single drive if a repair program can read the drive it might be able to save a lot of the data. With a RAIDed drive I would think a rescue program would need to understand the RAID array in order to save the data. Do programs like Norton Utilities recover data from failed RAID drives?

 

[Ketchup]

In my opinion, RAID1 is a waste of money for most computer users. Most people have a CD burner, so you can save yourself a lot of money by backing up to CD's. As for RAID 0, I love it. It makes your computer a little snappier, but won't blow you away with speed. The key is to get your stripe size right. By selecting the right size of the blocks of data that are moved to and from the RAID array, your can make the array faster for what you are doing with your computer.

I really don't agree with the "twice as likely to fail" theory either. While it is theoretically true, you still aren't talking about a huge probability of failure. If you want your hard drives to last, keep then cool (a fan and plenty of airspace around them) use flat cables (rounded cables are suspect in many hard drive failures. Even though some are supposedly better than others, I still don't trust them), and do not overclock your PCI bus. This should decrease your probability of failure by a good bit.