SATA II RAID question........ HEEELLLLPPPPP...

jpe20

Hi folks.....

I am building a new PC system for the 1st time and I am thinking of buying a couple of hard drives to put in a RAID configuration for performance reasons.

My plan is to use a parity RAID config. so that I can use many inexpensive disks (ie Maxtors x 4stripe +1parity) in a RAID 5 or RAID 0+1 config. I have read the Wikipedia article on RAID and I am none the wiser (I am a fool!!!). So what do I need to buy hard drive wise to have the benefits of the performance increase from striping but the reliabilty of parity from an extra single drive. I don't understand the difference between RAID 5 and RAID 0+1. Ideally I would like to buy 5 cheap 250-300GB drives (Maxtor DiMax10 SATAII) use 4 for striping and 1 for parity.... is this possible under a RAID config??? and can I rebuild a drive if one of the 5 go faulty?????

Sorry for rambling as I am a little tipsy !!!!!!..... Just on my mind thats all...

System being built ASUS M2NSLIMB ... 2x7900GTX.... 3800x2 AMD oc ..... etc....

Just that I think the HDD performance is a major bottleneck in general windows performance so I am hoping that 5 drives in some sort of RAID config will mean that I will have a superfast system. [subnote ... just that seems cheaper than paying out for the WD Raptors with 10K rpm speed rating.... I am not rich!!!!]

Hope u guys can help....
Jules

albertross_2

What are you planning to use this PC for? Getting more ram for cacheing might be easier and cheaper than raid. It's a bit OTT for a PC unless you have special needs.., usually reserved for a server environment. Unless you have a 512Megabit/second broadband link, it's not going to make bittorrent work any faster etc..

(I am an old schooler, and don't understand this need for speed trend .. unless you are going to be working for Pixar. Now, where's my 486 with 16MB of ram..?)

jpe20

The reason I am doing this is that I am fed up with the lousy performance in windows when it uses the Hard Disk. In my new system I want to try and eliminate this bottleneck. The new system I am building is 1700quid+ so seems reasonable to me to spend 200quid or so on a couple of HDDs.
Jules

weemee

Hi,

I think you might be over egging the pudding using the setup's you suggested.

The best perfomance would be;

2 x (identical drives, same cache etc.) on raid 0 for windows and apps.

2 x drives set to raid 1 (mirror) for data file backups. I.E keep your music, images etc here. These drives do not need to be a match. This will keep read write requests off of your OS drives and keep the system running smoother while dealing with large files etc.

I would also be tempted to buy two raptor drives (the small ones) for the raid 0 as this will give the best overall perfomance. If you pop over to tomshardwareguide you will find on the right hand menu a round up of drives and their perfomance.

The problem with creating a larger raid is that they can be complex to get going, and windows xp is poor at handling them - especially if you are using a motherboard raid to do it.

Hope this helps.

esuhl

When I recently upgraded from my old IDE hard drives, I bought 2 identical drives and stuck them in a RAID 0 (striping) array. Because of the lack of fault-tolerance with this setup, I kept my old IDE drives for data backups.

Works for me, and the disk performance is greatly improved.

albertross_2

My point was, what is the bottleneck, and which real world application would expose the bottleneck (if it exists in your new system)?

weemee

Video editing is a good example of where Raid 0 helps