RAID setup question.

[Bad Dude]

If I want to run RAID IDE on Strip 0, do I have to run all 4 drives of the same size? Or can I run two 40Gbs and two 30 Gbs?
So if I run two 40GBs and two 30GBs:
1) Does it total to 140 GBs? or
2) 120 Gbs?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

OK.
The second question is:
What if I got two 40 GBs in stripe 0 on masters? And I got one 45 Gbs and I want to connect it to the controller on one of the slaves, can I have the two 40Gbs on Stripe 0 for performance and the 45Gb for just on the controller as a 45 Gbs by itself?

Thanks.

 

[Rickten]

Yup, 140 GB's. 1 x 80gig and 1 x 60.

 

[Nevo]

You can do one of two things, assuming your RAID hardware supports it:

-Create two stripe sets, one across the 40GB drives, and one across the 30GB drives, for two 'disks' totalling 140. This will be seen as two drives in the OS. If you want, under W2K you could create a volume set between the two.

-Create one stripe set across all four disks, which will use 30GB from each disk, for a total of 120GB, and you'll have two areas of 10GB each on the two 40GB drives left that you can then use for either a second stripe set or additional partitions.

 

[Bad Dude]

Thanks for the info guys. So what stripe should I create for top performance?

 

[JoeDaddy]

<< he second question is:
What if I got two 40 GBs in stripe 0 on masters? And I got one 45 Gbs and I want to connect it to the controller on one of the slaves, can I have the two 40Gbs on Stripe 0 for performance and the 45Gb for just on the controller as a 45 Gbs by itself? >>



To my knowledge the raid controller can only be one or the other. Either a Raid controller or an ata100 controler. But if you are using a motherboard that has onboard raid, you could just connect the 45gb to either your primary/secondary(ide 1/2) ports. But you could not connect it to either of the raid ports, (ide3/4).



<< So what stripe should I create for top performance? >>



For top performance I would say the raid array w/ 4 30gb drives and have 2 10gb partitions left over.

 

[rawko]

you will not be impressed if you have more than 1 drive per channel

 

[Bad Dude]

So why won't I be impress with more than one drive on a channel?
Thanks.

 

[zzzz]

<< The second question is:What if I got two 40 GBs in stripe 0 on masters? And I got one 45 Gbs and I want to connect it to the controller on one of the slaves, can I have the two 40Gbs on Stripe 0 for performance and the 45Gb for just on the controller as a 45 Gbs by itself? >>


I have done it succesfully on kt7a-raid and on a7v133(after using the hacked bios for promise raid controller). I had 2 *30 striped on master of the raid controller and one 45 gb as a single disk slave to the primary raid controller.

 

[rawko]

did you ever put 2 drives on a ide channel and try to access them? if you tried to copy a file from one to the other, it would be incredibly slow compared to having them on seperate channels. I thus think that in the raid array, it would be even worse.

 

[MichaelD]

RAID controllers are designed to support only one drive per channel. As stated already, your transfer times would be ridiculously slow, and the possbility of data corruption would be very high. This is why dedicated hardware RAID cards have 4-6 IDE ports; so you can have RAID 0+1 or a 4-drive RAID 0 setup; w/one drive per channel.

 

[neuralfx]

Ok for one, you cant do it that way.. actaully, optimally you want all your drives to be EXACTLY the same model, and size, if you use different sized disks, say a 2-drive RAID-0, one being 40gb, and one being 20. you will only use 20gb's of the 40gig.. so instead of 60gb's of storage u have 40gb.. No you, you dont want to put more than one disk on each channel, ever on a RAID array, you would just be defeating the point of having raid 0.... if you really want the performance I suggest looking at one of the 3ware HARDWARE raid cards... oh ya go to http://www.storagereview.com there is plethora of info on RAID theory, and raid cards, etc.. good luck..
-neural

 

[Bad Dude]

Thanks for all the usefull info guys.
The problem I am having is that when I tried to install WinXP build 2465 or later, the format keep saying that my disk is either damage or not terminated properly if I was using RAID. This never happens with WinME, Win2K, or WinXP build 2465 or older. I think this might be a bug in the OS. I was hoping putting two more 30GBs on the slave will eliminate this problem. Also WinXP keep detecting that on bus 0 has 0MB disk and on bus 1 has my two disks on RAID.

Anyone knows how to fix this problem?
Thanks.

 

[magicgeek]

you can use 40g &amp; 30g, but the total will be the size of the smallest drive, 30x4=120g

thanks

 

[zzzz]

Bad_Dude, which raid controller are you using?
I had heard the RC1 had trouble on the highpoint controller while the earlier versions worked ok.
BTW, I had made a ghost image of my 60gb raid array(2*30) on a 45 gb HD which was slave to one of the raided HD's and the image was about 10gb. It turned out ok and transfer speed was decent too...

 

[Bad Dude]

Hi zzzz,
Yes I am using the Highpoint 370 RAID controller. It comes on my Abit KT7a_RAID.
So is there any fix for it?