Will WinXP HE have software RAID?

[CZroe]

I know this is the hardware topic, but it appears to be very general anyway

People keep saying the primary difference between WinXP Home & Professional Editions will be dual-monitor support & dual-processor support. What about WinNT/2Ks ability to RAID any drives without a RAID controller? That seems to be a logical "Pro version only" feature, but I hear no mention of it. I will be getting the Pro version anyway for my dual processor machine. It has the ability to connect up to 8 IDE devices, so that's why I'm interested. Oops, just a thought: Could software RAID be reserved for XP Server instead?! I sure hope not...

 

[Rand]

XP home will not support a software RAID configuration natively, XP Professional does.

 

[Chu]

Newbie question, are we talking about Raid0 or Raid1? For some reason I can't capture uncompressed video on my 7200rpm drive using XP on a ghz machine without dropping, and was seriously considering a raid0 setup as a solution since I'm assuming the barrier is transfer speed (since you can't play these back without dropping frames either). If it is Raid0, do you get the full proformance benefits? I'm really intrigued here . . .

-Chu

 

[CZroe]

Well, the simple fact that your CPU handles it means you loose a little performance over a true-hardware RAID. The IDE bus has always had high CPU utilization during transfers, & that doubles / quadruples it. Believe it or not, most IDE RAID cards including Promise's rely on the CPU to do their dirty work, so they're not true "hardware RAID controllers." They just don't require drivers to work (The OS drivers is just the same as a SCSI hardware driver, it's not what's eating the CPU cycles). However, as you've no doubt noticed, the real problem is sustained read/write speeds, & it does effectively double / quadruple that. In other words, capturing raw video requiring a fast hard drive will benefit, but capturing video & compressing it in real time while writing it to the drive will probably suffer unless you RAID w/ SCSI drives or a true-hardware IDE RAID. I see no reason to get a SCSI Hardware RAID card if the OS can do it w/ no drawbacks using a regular SCSI adapter, but they do exist.

 

[janlievens]

<<Could software RAID be reserved for XP Server instead?! >>

there's going to be a server version of XP ??? yum-yum

 

[mastertech01]

Another alternative, though not cheap, is the ATTO PCI Express SCSI raid controller.. unlike most true hardware raid controllers, the ATTO uses Software of its own. It does utilize more CPU cycles to operate but its performance is roughly double that of an average hardware raid controller like Adaptec, yet gives the multitasking and hardware support qualities of SCSI. A single channel ATTO with software runs under 400.00. The software itself sells for well over 200.00 so the combo package is the most price efficient. Performance wise it will do circles around Win2k software raid.

There are hardware raid alternatives that perform as well or better but run well over 1000.00

 

[Scootin159]

<< <EM><<Could software RAID be reserved for XP Server instead?!<EM> >>

there's going to be a server version of XP ??? yum-yum >>



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