XP and Raid performance question

[jpetermann]

2 questions here for you all. I am a newbie with raid, so here it goes:

1. Is there a performance difference between a) A fresh install on win XP on a raid setup and b) a drive
to drive ghost image to the raid setup.

2. How does a raid setup and XP handle overclocking? Am I in for problems? Dta loss and corruption?
I don't want to have to re-install just because I tried to overclock.

Thanks for your answers!

 

[NogginBoink]

Pastorjay,

Before we can answer your questions, we need to know if you're talking about hardware RAID or sofware RAID.

-Noggin

 

[jpetermann]

Here goes the "newbie" in me:

I am not sure what the diff is. If you mean is it built into my motherboard yes, I assume that means is it a hardware raid. Here is my system, meant to include that above, sorry...

Gigabyte 7vrxp (kt333)
Athlon xp1800
Radeon 8500
512 Crucial ddr
2x40gb Maxtor Ata 133 in Raid (0) config
Pine 16x dvd
TDK 24x cdrw
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum

Hope that is what you need to know. I have built a lot of systems, just never used raid, so I feel so much like a "newbie."

 

[Kappo]

1) no less performance than if you had the same "installed" config on your system.

2) while there is a chance for data loss if something goes screwy, I have never once had a problem with it from overclocking. That is not to say that it cant happen, mind you, and I am sure it has, but it really comes down to what your hardware can handle.

Just my opinion, but I think you would be ok to OC and run raid (god knows I sure do!) with little or no issues from the OC.

 

[NogginBoink]

Ah. Yes, you're using hardware RAID; the RAID is being performed by a chip on the motherboard and the OS only "sees" one drive even though there are >1 physical disks. (If you were using software RAID you'd set it up in disk management. And I should have known you're talking hardware RAID because XP Pro doesn't support software RAID; only the Server OSes do.)

I would be very wary of a ghost image, especially on a RAID set. Although theoretically it should work, I've never had customers able to do it. Also, using Ghost is not a supported installation method for WinXP, unless you're using sysprep as well. Lastly, if you're Ghosting a non-RAIDed drive to a RAIDed drive, it's likely that you'll need different disk controller drivers and would end up with a STOP 7B bluescreen at boot.

To answer your direct question, though, there should be no performance difference, provided the Ghost cloning works.

The second question is a bit more tricky to answer. The OS doesn't know/care the clockspeed of your motherboard. But as clock speeds go up, the components on the motherboard are diven to and then past their tolerances. The NT kernel (NT/W2K/XP) is *far* less forgiving of hardware problems than Win 9x/ME. Bottom line is that you can probably overclock and be perfectly stable, but perhaps not overclock as far as you could with Win9x on the same machine.

 

[jpetermann]

Actually, I have already done the ghosting. It worked like a charm. I was more curious as if you take a performance hit with it installed rather than an actual install of the os. I have not really seen a dif in the two. I am glad to hear that about overclocking. I will have to try it!