RAID1 Accessories and Explanations needed

[BasariStudios]

Hello,
never in my life used Raid before, now few people gave me the idea of using Raid on my new
system. I dont know much about it besides that it is 2 disks mirored to each other and the Data
is written to both at the same time which slows down the Write time. Now to not make things
complicated for understanding i will write in Paragraphs the questions. It will be used on an
ASUS P755D-E MoBo with I7 860 and also a 500 GB Samsung F3 SpinPoint as a OS drive:

1. Does Raid also slows Reading speed? Which would be a defenite NO GO for me since
what i do mostly relies on Reading from disk, large Audio tracks...i see no reason to slow the
speed down when Reading since it read from one Disk at that time but just to make sure...
if so how much slower would Reading performance get?

2. On the above Components, what Exactly do i need besides the 2 Identical HDDs which would
probably be 2 x 1 TB Samsung F3 SpinPoints. I dont know anything about a Raid Controller/Card,
Software, where do the Disks go, do they need anything additional for Mounting, specific Cooling
for them and all other things that come to your mind at the moment...?

3. Can that be achieved only thru installing both HDDs on the system and then Miror them directly
thru Windows 7 or it has to also do something with Hardware modifications and connections?

In general anything about Raid1 will help.

Thank You!

 

[pjkenned]

You can easily use te Intel Storage Matrix on that board for Raid 1. Read/ write speeds are basically going to be the same as a single disk. With two drives, don't worry about an add-in Raid controller.

 

[BasariStudios]

Thanks bro, basically a lot of people answered almost with same response.
Now instead of 1 TB i have to buy 2x1TBs and still have the same 1TB space
but this time i am at least a little DATA loss safe...plus i will have an eSATA
1 TB as additional BackUp which will be identical to the internal 1TB drive.

 

[Nothinman]

I dont know much about it besides that it is 2 disks mirored to each other and the Data is written to both at the same time which slows down the Write time.

RAID1 is a mirror, other levels of RAID have different data layouts. And writes should happen at the same speed, it's not like the OS is waiting for one drive to complete it's writes before moving onto the other half of the mirror.

1. Does Raid also slows Reading speed? Which would be a defenite NO GO for me since what i do mostly relies on Reading from disk, large Audio tracks...i see no reason to slow the speed down when Reading since it read from one Disk at that time but just to make sure...if so how much slower would Reading performance get?

Worst case it will be the same as 1 drive, if the RAID implementation you end up using is smart it'll be up to double since it can stagger the reads across the two drives.

2. On the above Components, what Exactly do i need besides the 2 Identical HDDs which would probably be 2 x 1 TB Samsung F3 SpinPoints. I dont know anything about a Raid Controller/Card, Software, where do the Disks go, do they need anything additional for Mounting, specific Cooling for them and all other things that come to your mind at the moment...?

Depends on how you want to implement it. I prefer Linux software RAID to the onboard crap or even most hardware solutions because of the additional flexibility.

3. Can that be achieved only thru installing both HDDs on the system and then Miror them directly thru Windows 7 or it has to also do something with Hardware modifications and connections?

Only certain SKUs of Windows support redundant RAID levels. Unless you've got one of them you won't even have a choice of RAID levels other than 0 or whatever they call concatenated volumes.

 

[pjkenned]

Quote:
Originally Posted by BasariStudios
2. On the above Components, what Exactly do i need besides the 2 Identical HDDs which would probably be 2 x 1 TB Samsung F3 SpinPoints. I dont know anything about a Raid Controller/Card, Software, where do the Disks go, do they need anything additional for Mounting, specific Cooling for them and all other things that come to your mind at the moment...?

Depends on how you want to implement it. I prefer Linux software RAID to the onboard crap or even most hardware solutions because of the additional flexibility.


Quote:
Originally Posted by BasariStudios
3. Can that be achieved only thru installing both HDDs on the system and then Miror them directly thru Windows 7 or it has to also do something with Hardware modifications and connections?

Only certain SKUs of Windows support redundant RAID levels. Unless you've got one of them you won't even have a choice of RAID levels other than 0 or whatever they call concatenated volumes.

Just as a follow-up: Linux raid won't work for your (OP's) application which is running Windows 7. Linux raid is NOT OS independent as is Intel ICH9R/ICH10R raid. For raid 1 there isn't going to be a difference performance wise between Linux and Intel raid, it is just the Linux one won't work for Windows 7 and the Intel one will. For the record (in the event someone searches this thread later) hardware raid is also OS independent so that makes it quite a bit more flexible than Linux since you aren't going to be running Windows 7 off of a Linux software raid array unless you do something like iSCSI (which would be worse performance of course).

You don't want to use Microsoft software RAID 1 (or RAID 5) just because it requires dynamic disks which are non-bootable and a bit of an annoyance to work with. In reality, for RAID 0/1/10 Intel onboard raid is going to be better than anything except a dedicated card with a lot of battery backed write cache.

Note, I am singling out Intel onboard because it is a pretty big step up from something like NVIDIA onboard raid.

 

[yinan]

Just to clarify with Windows 7 dynamic disks are bootable now I believe.