Anyone have any experience with Dynamic Disk Striping under windows XP?
 

I'm interested in striping my two IDE video drives to "double" my throughput and wondered if anyone has any experience with this under XP? Good? Bad? Unstable?

Cheers
Aaron

Hi Aaron.

No problem at all. Use it myself and very happy. Best results are achived using identical (same model) drives.

Best regards,
Arnaldo

Performance increase should not be as much as a hardware
solution, and it is never ever twice the speed for example.

Should work fine.

Keep in mind that with striping if you loose one drive you loose
all the drives!

I heard that!
 

I lost 60 gigs of data a while back from 1 of 2 drives due to a sudden crash that was found to be a mechanical failure. This is the danger of using striping RAID 0. If only ONE goes out, you're screwed. Data recovery started at $8,000-$20,000. I guess I'll have to do without that for a while! Luckilly, the drive is still under warranty but that won't get my data back! I will be backing up with DVD in the near future.

Now that I'm thinking about this, does XP actually support this?
I know that Windows 2000 (where I have worked with it) only
supports this in their server products (which XP doesn't have).

Yes it does.

Best regards,
Arnaldo

It's best to use a thrid party software to strip it. Building it up from XP you are using their build for the RAID whereas when you set it up with Partition Magic you have better control of the drives.

Does Partition Magic have software RAID drivers? That's interesting. The company I work for just bought Powerquest the other month so I can get a copy for free now ;)

I've always been wary of RAID but I have 2 120GB drives and it's annoying splitting your files among them.

Catchya
Aaron

Re: Anyone have any experience with Dynamic Disk Striping under windows XP?
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Aaron Koolen : I'm interested in striping my two IDE video drives to "double" my throughput and wondered if anyone has any experience with this under XP? Good? Bad? Unstable?

Cheers
Aaron -->>>

Absolutely stable. I've been doing since NT. Then 2000 Pro and now XP.

Much more reliable than the Promise controller I had under 98. No driver problems (the RAID is made by the OS manufacturer so there should be no driver problems and there are not) In fact there are no drivers. One just does it in the Disk Manager.

That is a great advantage . . . to have the RAID support from the OS manufacturer. The RAID arrays (and I had 5 of them at one time with as many as 4 disks per array) moved right along with the OS changes without any glitches. In fact, it was entirely transparent and I had to do nothing. You likely won't get that from a 3rd party software or hardware RAID product.

Won't double your throughput but it will give it a healthy boost.

Understand that a 7200 rpm 100 or 133 Mhz ATA drive in DMA 5 mode will handle a couple of streams of DV in real time without much problem. RAID is good if you need more streams than that.

Keep in mind that you must upgrade your disks from basic to
dynamic first before you can choose RAID. I think it only works
with NTFS as well? (not sure on that one). You'd want to use
NTFS anyway.