RAID questions

tigersty1e

Golden Member
Dec 13, 2004
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Let's say I have 3 drives in RAID 1.

1. I take out all the hard drives and connect 1 of the hard drives directly to the motherboard (not the raid controller). Will the system behave as if nothing happened? That is, can I boot the system and continue on without problems?


2. Does 1 hard drive always act as the main drive and copy to the other drives or do the roles change periodically?

3. Let's say I move a large file from an outside source onto my computer. As soon as the file is finished copying, can I turn the system off or do I have to wait for the drives to copy each other?

4. The read portion of RAID 1 is fater than 1 hard disk on Vista, right? How slower is the write portion?... the more hard disk on the RAID array slows it up, no?
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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1. I take out all the hard drives and connect 1 of the hard drives directly to the motherboard (not the raid controller). Will the system behave as if nothing happened? That is, can I boot the system and continue on without problems?

It depends on how the controller stores the data on the drive. I think most of the cheapo onboard fakeRAID controllers just store some metadata at the end of the drive so unless you know what to look for it appears like a regular drive.

2. Does 1 hard drive always act as the main drive and copy to the other drives or do the roles change periodically?

Ideally they would both be updated at the same time.

3. Let's say I move a large file from an outside source onto my computer. As soon as the file is finished copying, can I turn the system off or do I have to wait for the drives to copy each other?

A decent controller won't let the last sync finish until both copies are up todate so even if you start a shutdown it'll hang while the drives finish writing out the data.

4. The read portion of RAID 1 is fater than 1 hard disk on Vista, right? How slower is the write portion?... the more hard disk on the RAID array slows it up, no?

That's the general belief but again it depends on the configuration. Read should be faster because there's never a time that the OS can't interleave the reads or get the data from memory, write is generally slower because the OS has to wait for 2 copies to be written out.
 

imported_wired247

Golden Member
Jan 18, 2008
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3 drives in raid1 (assuming they are the same size) doesn't really make sense to me unless you have 1 drive as a hotspare. so you'd effectively only have 33% of the capacity you paid for.

Just curious how you got into this situation.
 

tigersty1e

Golden Member
Dec 13, 2004
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LOL.

I was watching the movie, "I Am Legend"... and the main character records all of his data on 6 redundant disks.

I was just thinking that if there was ever a "S4it Hit The Fan" scenario where I needed to protect important data, I would know what I'm doing.....