Raid Questions (1-Different HDDs 2-Which Controller)

[foodfightr]

Don't reply about the effectiveness of raid 0 please!


(1) I'd like to stripe a 150gb raptor I purchased when they originally came out with a 150gb raptor-x. The raptor-x is brand new. When I looked at the numbers, one is R0 and one is R1. I'm assuming this stands for revision. I hope this won't pose a problem. As far as I know they are the same HDD, but one has a window.

(2) The raid controller on my motherboard is CRAP. I can install windows on each hard drive seperately, but it crashes when I try to stripe the two drives and install windows. I'm thinking that I need a raid controller card. All I want to do is run raid 0. Should I opt for PCI Express or PCI? Which card will get the job done without limiting performance?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: foodfightr
(1) I'd like to stripe a 150gb raptor I purchased when they originally came out with a 150gb raptor-x. The raptor-x is brand new. When I looked at the numbers, one is R0 and one is R1. I'm assuming this stands for revision. I hope this won't pose a problem. As far as I know they are the same HDD, but one has a window.

(2) The raid controller on my motherboard is CRAP. I can install windows on each hard drive seperately, but it crashes when I try to stripe the two drives and install windows. I'm thinking that I need a raid controller card. All I want to do is run raid 0. Should I opt for PCI Express or PCI? Which card will get the job done without limiting performance?

(1) You can mix and match different drives. There should be no problem with drives that similar.

(2a) Which motherboard and RAID controller is it? Did you extract the RAID drivers onto a floppy and install all of them via F6 during installation?

(2b) PCI will limit your performance to PCI levels -- around 100 MB/s in practice. PCIe, even x1 (250 MB/s), will give you more headroom. The same issues apply with on-board RAID controllers; the ones going through PCI will limit your max performance; native on-board shouldn't have this limit.

Your max STR performance with 2-drive RAID 0 should be close to the max STR performance with individual drives X 2. Raptors can do somewhere around 80 MB/s max sustained, which means that to get max sustained 2x RAID 0 sustained, you need around 160 MB/s bandwidth at least -- you can't get this from standard PCI.

 

[alaricljs]

1: As long as the 2 disks are the same size it doesn't matter at all, could be different manufacturer, could be different spindle speed. Performance will suck if the metrics are different, but it can still be done.

2: Unless you are willing to spend hundreds on a controller all you are getting is a driver that does software RAID. You want to spend hundreds? Areca FTW.

 

[foodfightr]

So... DFI mobo raid versus $100 cheap hardware controller

performance difference?

 

[alaricljs]

DFI mobo RAID may be on the PCIe bus, so that's a plus as compared to a PCI RAID card... so possibly faster on-board depending on what transfer rate your drives can spew.