Rocket RAID 133

[Kaustav]

I recently purchased a Rocket RAID 133 card for my PC. Installation was a breeze, I followed the set up manual to the T and used to the RAID BIOS setup program to "create" my RAID 0 array and initialise it. The software reported everything was good and the RAID 0 array was created. I then rebooted as requested. Upon boot up the RAID card detected both the 80Gb Maxtor drives and then promptly overwrote the names of the disks with the name I gave the RAID array. Great. So Windows XP loads up and I go in to "My Computer". Where is my RAID drive gone? Before I created the array I have two drive icons, drive e: and f:. Now I don't have any drive visible.

So I load the RAID configuration utlitity which has lodged itself comfortably in a cosy corner of my task bar. Upon open the tab which shows the state of the RAID array currently set up to run, I see an icon which linked to the two hard drives which compose the array. Looking up this icon in the manual it says that the icon indicates that I have a good RAID 0 setup running.

So what gives? Where am I going wrong? Where is my RAID'ed drive gone? Do I need to do something further in XP to actually register the new RAID array? This is the first time I've set up an IDE RAID before so I'm a little lost, some assistance from anyone in the know would be much appreciated....

Kaustav

 

[Superwormy]

If it was Win2k I'd go into the Disk Manager under Computer Management, and check to see if the array is formatted. I dont think drives will show up until formatted correctly...

But I'm just guessing... and I've never used RAID...

 

[KenGr]

Did you FDISK the RAID array? You need to do this before Windows can recognize it. Although I think WinXP can FDISK a drive in the process of installing the operating system on it, I have always done the FDISK with a bootable floppy. After you have the FDISK done, WinXP will recognize the drive and you can FORMAT it.

 

[Kaustav]

Well during installation I only fdisk'ed drive C: which my primary boot drive which XP boots off. The other two drives did a "quick format" on during the XP disk manager.

But hmmm, I will go in to XP's disk manager again tonight and check if the drives are seen and formatted correctly. The drives were brand new and unformatted before I did the quick format on them. Is a quick format on brand new drives no recommended? Should I do a proper full reformat of the two RAID drives? They are currently totally blank so no worries there.

Also, I used a block size o 64K when creating the RAID array. It gave me options to go up to 2048Kb. What's a good compromise block size when keeping in mind that the primary and possibly only use of the RAID is for storing and reading A/V.

 

[KenGr]

You've got me a little confused. You seem to say the RAID drives were formatted as individual (non-RAID) drives originally. Any FDISk or Format done that way is meaningless after you hook them to the RAID. You need to do the FDISK and Format on the RAID array which is a new and different drive from the component drives (as far as the computer is concerned).

For A/V work (very large files) it is generally recommended to make a large stripe size. If you have the options, many people recommend 128 or 256K. I don't know if I would go all the way to 2056 but in theory, large files should be faster all the way up to the drive cache size. Unless you want to experiment I'd just go with 256k. Note that many benchmarks will show faster performance with small stripes (like 16k) because they are optimized for small files.

 

[Kaustav]

It all seems rather obvious when someone in the know explains it to you properly. DOH! Thanks for the advise. I formatted the new RAID array through XP Disk Management and after that was done the drive was visible. I've deleted the RAID and re-created is with a block size of 256Kb which seems to work quite well with the A/V files I'm using. Cool beans!