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RAID question

G

Geekwannab

Member
I am getting the P5WDH Deluxe for my new C2D build and I have a question on the RAID configuration. I am also getting the seagate 7200.10 320 HDD and I was wondering if i could buy 2 of them now and set up in RAID 1 and later get two more and change to RAID5??. Will the RAID array build itself when I change the RAID setup(say if I leave my PC on overnight). Soory if this question was asked alreadu, but I did a search @AT forums and a lot of other forums and couldn't find an answer.

Also, how good is the RAID controller on the P5WDH . Do I have to get a separate raid controller.


Thanks in advance
 
You can't "convert" between RAID arrays. You would need to make a backup of your system, remove the existing array and build a new one with the new drives, then restore your backup.

As for performance, there are lots of reviews which test performance of integrated RAID5. Most of the add-in controllers which do RAID5 will perform similarly, as they are all mostly doing the work in software with the drivers. A hardware RAID5 controller gets expensive.
 
Ok, what about I just have one HDD now without any RAID, then I plug in 2 or 3 more, Can i configure it in RAID 5 or does the same rule that I have to backup my system and configure the RAID array apply.
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
You can't "convert" between RAID arrays. You would need to make a backup of your system, remove the existing array and build a new one with the new drives, then restore your backup.

As for performance, there are lots of reviews which test performance of integrated RAID5. Most of the add-in controllers which do RAID5 will perform similarly, as they are all mostly doing the work in software with the drivers. A hardware RAID5 controller gets expensive.
Click to expand...

Does that mean RAID 5 on the P5WDH is software and not hardware.But, I have been reading that P5DH does not require any software/drivers for the RAID array to work
 
All RAID arrays will require a driver to be installed when installing Windows, to the best of my knowledge.

If you were using SATA without RAID, and then enabled RAID, you would need to ensure that you had the RAID driver installed in Windows before trying to boot with the RAID array enabled for your boot drive. And yes, you would have to make a backup, create the RAID array, then restore your backup onto the array. You can't take an existing configuration and change it to something else (actually I think you can create a mirrored array without destroying the existing drive, but definitely not with anything that involves striping, because the array controller would have to go through the entire drive removing bits from the first drive to put them onto the other new drives in the array).

Newer chipsets may or may not require that you install a driver just to use the SATA ports, whereas the first SATA controllers did always require a driver because they were not integrated into the chipset.

RAID5 requires a lot of processing power to do the parity calculations. In order to remain affordable, RAID5 that's integrated into chipsets or low-cost add-in controllers use the main CPU to do the calculations in software. Even with RAID0 or RAID1, much of the actual processing is done in the drivers, and the chipset just sends the data to whichever drive the software tells it to.
 
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