Striped drives
 

hey after a fruitful FFR of XPpro, once again the reign of stability has found its way into a MS product. now i am thinking of striping two 80 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. anyone have any experience with this kind of situation? i know back when i took win2k adv svr courses they suggested this would increase speed on a server, although not providing fault tolerance. im thinking this may help with speed of video files, however minor it may be. just curious if anyone has any input.

If you have the faster EIDE drives . . . 7200 RPM with some sort of buffer, you don't need a RAID for speed with regard to keeping up with single or dual stream RT DV. You might if you want to handle 5 or more streams.

RAID does increase your chances of problems that cause file loss just because you have 2 drives that contain your data instead 2 drives with date stored on one or the other. In one case you lose everything if you lose a drive, in the other, you only lose one-half the data.

I have SCSI, SCSI RAID, EIDE and EIDE RAID on a single machine with no problems in terms of operation. The RAIDs are formed in software through the Win2000 capability.

yea they are 80 GB WDs 7200, currently my mobo only supports upto ata66, although the WD disk has a util that claims they run ata100...tests at pcpitstop.com have clocked the cached speed of all drives around 267.19 MB/s and uncached at 5.1 MB/s- 6.37 MB/s. those are pretty good stats, ofcourse i do have the system clocked from 800 to 880 mhz, so the bus speeds have been upped a little. i would be using the standard IDE ports of the motherboard and enabling RAID 0 thru XP thru MMC, similar to your setup. I completely understand the issues of no fault tolerance as i have taken server courses and have worked as a tech, but i have never really used RAID before. Are you using RAID in a fault-tolerant config?

the whole reason i was doing this was to create one logical drive. i will not be using a fault tolerant config at this time. I was considering spanning the volume as well, simply to create one drive. Then i figured it might be a slight performance increase with the striped.

I don't think software based RAID is as fast as a hardware based one, as in a dedicated RAID controller card. But if all you want is a logical drive then go for it. Despite the apparent higher risk of failure with RAID 0 I have yet to experience any problems with my setups - /me knocks on wood - and I've been using hardware based RAID 0 with every computer I've built since '98.

Hi,

I also use HW Raid, works like a charm. Will expand my raid set with a 120gb Serial ATA drive next week.

Software raid >> I have used SW raid under W2K, worked good, BUT, when I reinstalled W2K, I couldn't mount my SW raidset again...160gb data lost.... maybe just bad luck..

// Lazze

Hey Lars, where are you buying your serial ATA drives from? I'd like to look into that for an upgrade sometime in late April, early May.

Hi Christopher,

I live in Sweden, here there are several stores that have Seagate Barracuda IV 80/120gb S-ATA drives in stock. I've also heard that WD will release their SATA drives in april.

120gb for about 240 USD

// Lazze