Yet another Raid question?

[Shack70]

I have an IWill KK266-R MB and I am going to set up a Raid 0 Stripe with a 26.7Gig Drive and a 15Gig Drive. If I set them under one Stripe(making 41.7gig). Is it possible to add another drive later to that stripe without having to reformat? I want to add another drive and then use something partition magic to enlarge the patition to the bigger size. Will this work or do I need to start another strip/reformat alltogether?

Thanks

 

[shathal]

Matey - I seriously recommend striping only same-size drives - better still identical modell & all. Also, your logic is flawed - if you're using non-identical sizes you will get increments of the smallest drive.

Thus, 21GB + 15GB == 2x 15GB == 30GB.

Either way - you save yourself a LOT of headaches if you use identical drives...

As to whether you can just add drives - depends on how smart the RAID-controller is. Generally, this is OK. I don't know your particular board that well, so can't guarantee that it will work.

 

[Shack70]

So in order get the most space out of my drives, I should put each drive on its own stripe?

 

[shathal]

In order to get the most out of it, you should be using identical drives. The more they are identical, the easier your life will be.

I.e.: 3x 30GB drive from Manufacturer XXX and Model YYY (all same) == 90GB of storage.

You "can't" put a single drive on its own stripe - there's no difference to it being on its own anyway. RAID begins only with 2+ drives. And in general, it's good RAID-etiquette to use identical drives.

Obviously, this is an "ideal world" scenarion and most end users (like you) have not only got different drive-models/manufacturers but also sizes. That's why RAID IMHO is something for ppl who can afford it & put up the effort to do it properly.

Preferrably, (in case it needs mentioning) the drives should be at the same speed/transfer rates & all that. I.e.: 7200 rpm, UDMA/100 & so on.

You probably can do your RAID with those two, but I wouldn't be surprised if you run into a few unpleasant effects as a result.

Why do you want it anyway - do you do anything that really requires RAID-0? Do be aware that if a single drive of a RAID-0 fails, the whole array fails. So make sure you do regular backups. Otherwise, don't even consider RAID-0.

Hope this helps somewhat .

 

[Shack70]

I want to do raid mainly because I am out of regular IDE contollers on my MB and figured I woul move my HDs over to the Raid contollers to make room for a burner and a DVD-Rom.

Right now I have
IDE 0 - 20GIG maxtor-5400rpm Master
IDE 0 - Pioneer 16X DVD - Slave
IDE 1 - 15Gig Maxtor-5400Rpm Master
IDE 1 - IDE Zip Drive Slave
IDE 2(raid contoller) - Empty
IDE 3(raid contoller) - Empty

I have a 12X IDE burner and a 27.6Gig Maxtor(5400rpm) HD I want to add to the system
The 20gig drive has the OS on it, and I don't feel like re-formatiing. I was going to add the 27.6 and the 15 to the Raid controller. Then put the burner on the regular IDE controller.

Later I was thinking of moving the 20gig over later if I decided to re-install the OS or if I could use something like ghost to copy the drive and put it on the raid drive. Then just add the 20Gig to the array(hopefully with no data loss). I was not planning on using the raid mirroring, but more for speed(raid 0 I think).

Thanks for helping me out.

 

[shathal]

You should be able to use the RAID-controller as a "normal" IDE-controller as well ...?



Just a though .

 

[Shack70]

I may end up doing that...I did it once before, but everytime I boot, it wants the Raid Bios tells me that no arrays are set.

 

[shathal]

Ah well - can't have everything.

Also - bad IDE-etiquette to have HDD & CD-ROM on one channel. Make life easier & have only HDD's on a channel or only "other" devices .

Hope this is useful .

 

[Shack70]

Yeah I know about putting the HDs together...It's been maily lazyness. As I get a new part, instead of reconfiguring the system, I just add it..I will prob. re-arrange the whole case and get it straight.
Thanks for all the advise

 

[shathal]

No Problem - glad to help .