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RAID info....


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So, with Circuit City's sale on 500GB HDDs i'm now the proud owner of 2 computers with over one TB of data each... My gaming rig has two 80GB drives in a stripped raid array... During the upgrade I relieved a 250GB drive... I contemplated putting it into the gaming rig, but that would make me have 2 extra 80GB drives.. Now, I DO have a 160GB drive I could swap out with the 250GB, but I was wondering if I could create an array within an array... The two 80GB drives make a 160GB drive, so in theory I could combine it to the other 160GB drive, giving me a 320GB drive...

Possible? Taking into account I'm running Vista x64 Edition...

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thats not really a sale. newegg has them for the same exact price without having to use a rebate..

now what type of raid do you want to run? raid0 is kind of pointless for normal use. even for games you will only notice a small increase in loading times. not worth losing your data over a few seconds or loading time..

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thats not really a sale. newegg has them for the same exact price without having to use a rebate..

now what type of raid do you want to run? raid0 is kind of pointless for normal use. even for games you will only notice a small increase in loading times. not worth losing your data over a few seconds or loading time..

You will gain a lot of speed in Raid 0. And you don't lose data if you're smart enough not to use a Raid 0 array to store data.

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well i alot of the real life example type of benchmarks don't show much of an improvement with raid0...

i personally could care less if my transfer rates go up a little when transferring large files, which i rarely do..

the only place that you really see a difference is in benchmarks, which really mean nothing.

for games you may be the first person on the map, but who cares if you have to wait around for enough ppl to join? i am already one of the first ppl on the map with a single hdd.

Edited by ripken204
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Trust me...there's a difference. The synthetic benchmarks may not show it...but it's perceptable. I can tell a huge difference when I'm converting audio files or copying large data files. The greatest advantage is really in the read speeds. Now if you want peace of mind and speed you'd get four identical drives and setup a RAID10 array. That basically takes two RAID1 arrays and stripes them (a RAID0 array made up of two sub-RAID1 arrays). You can do more than four drives in a RAID10 array, it just takes at least four and you have to have an even number of drives.

There is a way he could do what he's asking but it isn't RAID0. It's JBOD (aka Just a Bunch Of Disks). It basically makes them all look like one drive to the system. Data only gets written to one drive at a time though. JBOD basically writes to a single drive until that drive is full, then it moves to the next drive until it's full, and so on and so forth. There may be a slight read speed advantage but I wouldn't count on it.

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The drives were 99.99 a pop with a $40 mail in rebate, and I used a $40 off $199 coupon, in theory I stand to get $120 back and get three 500GB drive for a total of $140.... Little cheaper than Newegg....

Anyways... So there's no way to create a RAID 0 array in a RAID 0 array? I'm not doing it for speed, I'm just doing it for the sake of doing it using the drive...

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Trust me...there's a difference. The synthetic benchmarks may not show it...but it's perceptable. I can tell a huge difference when I'm converting audio files or copying large data files. The greatest advantage is really in the read speeds.

For multiple people accessing a single share or hitting the disk hard (ie a fileserver) it's a good performance boost.

For your average gamer, it's nearly worthless. It won't impact loading levels of Quake at all. It also ties you to the motherboard or RAID card that formatted the drives (so if that motherboard or card ever dies, your data is toast until you can get another one of that SAME motherboard or that SAME card). It's also risky (lose one disk, lose all your data). It just isn't worthwhile anymore for most people.

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You aren't tied to the same motherboard or the same card. You are, however, tied to the manufacturer of the particular RAID controller. So if you had a SCSI LSI Logic RAID controller, you will most likely be able to move your array to another SCSI LSI Logic RAID controller of a different model. This isn't always the case, but is true more often than not.

The same can be said of Intel's ICH RAID solution. If you have an array created on an ICH5R controller you can move that array to an ICH9R controller without data loss.

The benefits of true RAID (redundant, I don't consider RAID0 'true' RAID) far outweight the cons. Controllers die a lot less often than drives do. If you've had a lot of controllers going bad on you then you need to stop buying cheap controllers. :)

Also, a properly tuned hardware RAID controller will in fact show a measurable difference in RAID0. Get yourself a couple of SAS drives and a good SAS controller. For that matter, with a good SAS controller you could just use SATA drives. Benchmark that in single drive and RAID0 configurations. These onboard solutions use the system CPU for the RAID calculations so they aren't true hardware RAID. While todays CPUs are a lot faster and the difference isn't as noticeable, it's still no substitute for a good hardware RAID controller with a dedicated processor and cache.

RAID0 isn't designed for storing critical data. It's sole purpose is space and speed. If you have large amounts of unimportant data and don't want to or can't split it up across partitions then RAID0 is definitely for you.

Edited by nmX.Memnoch
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RAID0 isn't designed for storing critical data. It's sole purpose is space and speed. If you have large amounts of unimportant data and don't want to or can't split it up across partitions then RAID0 is definitely for you.

and i do have critical data. i dont see how people can buy 2x250gig hdds and raid0 them. there is no way that you have 500gigs of unimportant data..

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People who do video and audio editing likely have gigs worth of temp files on their drives. Those temp files are probably in a raw, uncompressed format as well so that's A LOT more space than the final product. Since they're temp files it wouldn't be catastrophic if a drive died. It's certainly no worse than running your system on a single drive (as far as the safety of the data). You wouldn't keep critical data on a single drive without backing it up either...

It also used to be more economical. Say you're upgrading on a budget and you already have a motherboard that has onboard RAID and you have plenty of SATA channels open. You know you need 750GB of space. Is it cheaper to purchase a single 750GB drive or purchase three 250GB drives and RAID0 them? Not only is it a little cheaper, but you also get that little speed advantage as well. Yeah, you have three times the chance of a drive failure, but you're not keeping critical data on it plus today's drives are a lot more reliable.

And yes...I do have that much data that's unimportant or can be replaced. I have two RAID0 arrays in my system...one 2x250GB array for the OS and one 2x400GB array for temp storage. My file server (at home) has 4x400GB drives in a RAID5 array...that's where my critical data goes.

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