Software RAID0

[Shenkoa]

Can 3 HDD's be set up for stripping on XP Pro?? or just 2??

 

[Zepper]

Striping is done in pairs. You can set up three drives to act as one using the JABOD function, but they won't be striped. Avoid using RAID-0 without a bulletproof backup plan! "Running RAID-0 without a verified backup plan is like flying an experimental aircraft without a parachute..." (c) 2000 WH.

.bh.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

How about "Avoid using RAID0 unless you're running a server, since that's the only access style that really benefits from it"? 😀

- M4H

 

[Acanthus]

you can stripe an unlimited number of drives via hardware and software... i had a 4 drive array on win2k not too long ago... you can use odd numbers of drives as well...

Im not sure about the facts on xp pros software raid though, do note that software raid does have a noticeable amount of cpu overhead.

 

[dakels]

Raid 5 which is 2 striped + 1 redundant. Like MH4 said already, its not worth the small benefit though unless there are things you do alot that benefit from a RAID stripe. But software controlled RAIDs tend to not be very beneficial in most every day performance but really improve your risk of data loss.

 

[MiniDoom]

Software RAID sucks, and you can?t strip the os just another partition. Just buy a RAID card they are only 75.00$.

 

[Acanthus]

The improving your risk of data loss is a farce. While you do have more drives to fail, the likelihood of those drives failing is low. With the MTBF of drives so rediculously high these days, odds are that if you dont get a defective drive that fails within a month, its very unlikely youre going to have a problem for a long time.

Stripe set with parity (raid5) loses some of the performance benefits,and dramatically increases cpu usage (if it isnt hardware raid 5), and the parity drive can't be used for storage, so you lose 1 entire drive of space. 3x200GB = 400GB space with R5.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Striping is done in pairs. You can set up three drives to act as one using the JABOD function, but they won't be striped. Avoid using RAID-0 without a bulletproof backup plan! "Running RAID-0 without a verified backup plan is like flying an experimental aircraft without a parachute..." (c) 2000 WH.

.bh.

You can stripe as many drives as you feel like.
Within the limitations of your controller and so forth of course.

 

[Woodie]

<< Can 3 HDD's be set up for stripping on XP Pro?? or just 2?>>

I've never seen a naked hard drive perform well once you take the covers off... 😉

RAID 0 = RAID NULL = NO *Redundant* Array Inependant Drives

RAID 5 performs significantly better once you hit 6+ drives in the array. (Also more space-efficient). Note: I'm NOT talking about these little IDE raid wanna-be's! I'm talking abou the real thing- SCSI drives in a server, w/ multiple concurrent read-write requests.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Woodie
<< Can 3 HDD's be set up for stripping on XP Pro?? or just 2?>>

I've never seen a naked hard drive perform well once you take the covers off... 😉

RAID 0 = RAID NULL = NO *Redundant* Array Inependant Drives

RAID 5 performs significantly better once you hit 6+ drives in the array. (Also more space-efficient). Note: I'm NOT talking about these little IDE raid wanna-be's! I'm talking abou the real thing- SCSI drives in a server, w/ multiple concurrent read-write requests.

At no point does raid 5 ever pass raid 0 in performance, the very nature of the way it works prevents this from being so.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Woodie
<< Can 3 HDD's be set up for stripping on XP Pro?? or just 2?>>

I've never seen a naked hard drive perform well once you take the covers off... 😉

RAID 0 = RAID NULL = NO *Redundant* Array Inependant Drives

RAID 5 performs significantly better once you hit 6+ drives in the array. (Also more space-efficient). Note: I'm NOT talking about these little IDE raid wanna-be's! I'm talking abou the real thing- SCSI drives in a server, w/ multiple concurrent read-write requests.

At no point does raid 5 ever pass raid 0 in performance, the very nature of the way it works prevents this from being so.

Nor will it ever be more space efficient.

 

[Woodie]

RAID 0 is NOT RAID! Once you get past that little detail...RAID 5 is more efficient space-wise than RAID 1 or RAID 1 + 0 or RAID 5 + 1 etc...

Also, I should have been clearer:
"RAID 5 performs significantly better once you hit 6+ drives in the array. "
RAID 5 performance improves significantly as you increase the number of spindles in the array. (Never meant to say that R5 would outperform R0)

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Shenkoa
Can 3 HDD's be set up for stripping on XP Pro?? or just 2??

3


Can't use it for your OS drive though. The drivers that support raid need loaded but they're on the array - catch 22.

 

[uOpt]

Raid-0 (striping) with three disks doesn't appear to be a problem given that two of my machines have parts of their storage set up that way. The performance is equivalent to a little more then 3 * base performance. No problem at all. With RAID-0 you can stripe anything you want together.

With RAID-1 (mirroring) you need exact mirrors, same for 0+1 and 5.

 

[aka1nas]

You can definately stripe 3 drives in software. I currently have 2 160GB maxtors in software RAID 0 for 320GB of storage. It is much faster and helps in capturing video. However, with 2 drives I am already saturating my PCI bus(running a dual athlon rig and the 32-bit PCI implementation has sucky bandwith) and when I was doing 3 drives at once it didn't improve performance at all compared to 2 drives.