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Windows XP(2003) RAID vs Controller Chip Soft RAID (promise)

H

HexiumVII

Senior member
I have a few motherboard with the soft RAID chips like Promise, ect. and i want to setup a RAID0 or 5 for redundancy of my photos. I've help setup a RAID5 in XP using the 2003 file switch and it seems to be pretty decent. Speeds are alright and i even reformatted the system and was able to get the RAID backup no problems. But i hear there can be issues of it just disappearing and such, and there is very little control/options for it. As for the Promise controllers and the like, there is the issue of if the motherboard dies or something, i probably won't be able to get it working on other controllers. I'm planning on upgrading my computer within the coming months, and if i go to another motherboard i am almost certain it won't be a simple drop in as with XP. Does anyone know if these volumes are supported in Vista? Vista has Stripping support built in.
 
I hear you that you want to do RAID 0 (mirroring) or 5 for ensuring accesability to photos. But if they are really that important, you might also want to consider external storage placed in the closet (in the event of theft), or off-site in the event of flood/fire (carbonite comes to mind).

I would be afraid to depend on XP OS RAID.
 
RAID0 is striping. RAID1 is mirroring. Easy way to remember: RAID0 actually has zero redundancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

An easier option is just to do nightly backups to an external drive, or to DVD would be even better since then power surges can't damage it. Even if you're using RAID, it's a good idea, although obviously harder due to capacity limits.

RAID5 is better than RAID0 because of the differences in capacity loss, and performance can be better for reading. You always lose half the capacity of the total capacity of all the drives (I've never seen anything but a 2-drive mirror, I don't really know how a 3+ drive mirror would be configured). With RAID5 you only lose the capacity of one drive no matter how many you have.

I am using WinXP striping right now for my TV recording machine. It's working okay, it's not blazing fast, I didn't bother to do a whole lot of testing and comparison of different cluster sizes, but yes, there are limitations to the configuration options. You can't set the stripe size (it always uses 64KB). One good thing is that you can set up varying partition sizes and multiple partitions on the drives for striping (or RAID1 or RAID5 in Server OSes), rather than just mirroring entire drives like most add-in controllers and even most current integrated RAID. Intel's Matrix RAID lets you do something similar, but I believe it's limited in the exact configurations.

The non-Server versions of any Windows OS do not support anything but RAID0 however (unless you want to hack a binary file), so you're pretty much stuck with using an add-in card if you use Vista, or the integrated RAID of the system chipset. There are plenty of reviews comparing the performance of integrated vs. add-in. One good thing about the integrated RAID is that the data doesn't have to pass over the PCI bus as it would with an add-in card (although a PCI-Express 1x add-in card wouldn't have quite as much performance limit). Nearly all current mainboards support at least RAID1 and RAID0, plust RAID1+0. Some also do RAID5, but it's still doing the calculations in software. Most add-in cards also don't do RAID5.

As for a failed controller or mainboard, if you swap the dead one for a model with the same chipset, whether it's integrated or add-in, you should be able to use the existing array. The data for the array is stored on the drive itself, and read by the chipset on bootup to determine what arrays exist. If it's the same chipset, it should automatically detect the array. I think it may be possible for later versions of the same controller to work with older arrays, like an nforce4 array on an nf5 mainboard, not sure, but definitely if you used a different brand it wouldn't work.

I don't think there are currently any serious issues with losing RAID configuration in Windows. I do support for some ancient NT4 servers with ancient drives that are prone to failure, and those do lose their array setup regularly. This seems to be an issue with the old hardware (P-2 400MHz for reference). It only usually results in the array becoming broken though, so a mirrored array would just end up with 2 separate, non-mirrored drives, which you could then rebuild the mirror on. However the nice thing is, the array is usable no matter what drive controller it's on, so you can just swap a mainboard right out. Also if a single drive fails when using Windows RAID1, you can still boot from the remaining drive, and Windows just warns you that one of the drives has failed. The same happens with RAID5. And there's no worries about needing to get a controller that can read it. The same ought to happen with an add-in/integrated RAID controller, but you're still stuck with the need for the same type of controller if it needs to be replaced.

Software RAID's other advantage is that the drives can be plugged into any drive controller in the system, no matter what type of interface it uses (although Windows doesn't use removeable drives for RAID normally).
 
Originally posted by: HexiumVII
I have a few motherboard with the soft RAID chips like Promise, ect. and i want to setup a RAID0 or 5 for redundancy of my photos. I've help setup a RAID5 in XP using the 2003 file switch and it seems to be pretty decent.
Click to expand...

You shouldn't rely on RAID alone, particularly a hacked RAID to preserve your photos for you. You'd be better advised to get a drive and an external enclosure, and to run a backup process -- in addition to running a properly-supported RAID with redundancy such as RAID 1 or RAID 5.
 
If you have a good backup or two, then issues like OLRM, portability across chipsets / operating systems are just nice to have -- you could just drop the array, recreate it with whatever's available in the new system, and restore the data from backup.

Vista has native RAID 0 and JBOD support. The XP/2003 hack should be dead in Vista.

I've run various VIA and NV RAIDs in Vista, and even taken an older nForce chipset / W2K RAID 0 array over to a new nForce chipset / Vista machine without issues.

I've hit 140 MB/s read/write with 3-drive NV RAID 5 using actual large file transfers (under Vista at least), which isn't bad. I've heard similar results with ICH8R/ICH8DO/etc.

Another alternative if you're concerned and still budget-minded would be an inexpensive controller such as a RocketRaid 2300.

Again, backup > all in these cases.
 
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