can someone help me on this.

i have just bought two seagate 500gb 32mb sata drives and was thinkiong of using them in RAID

 

the pc is mainly for films and playing games and dvd burning

i was thinking of using RAID 0 to make them run fast , i have another drive for important stuff like pic's etc.

 

or would RAID 1 be better, can you put partitions on RAID drive, and is there much difference is speed between the two RAID,s

 

MOBO had SATA RAID connections and i'm running AMD Dual core 4200 and 4g of ram

Basically

 

RAID 0 (stripe) will give you 1TB of HDD space and is good for speed.

RAID 1 (mirror) will give you 500Gb of HDD space and is good if one of the drives was to go faulty.

 

RAID 0 is definately faster mate + the advantage of the extra storage. Only problem is that if 1 of the 2 HDD fail in the array you will loose all data!

 

You can partition the drive AFTER you have built the RAID Array.

 

Pete

Edited September 11, 200817 yr by turb0z

what would be the speed advantage between running two drives on there own and RAID 0, my old drives are prob only 8 or 16mb

what would be the speed advantage between running two drives on there own and RAID 0, my old drives are prob only 8 or 16mb

In theory they will be twice as fast in a RAID 0 configuration because you have twice as many heads, read/write buffer etc. However, I think the data bus on your MOBO will be the bottle neck. Also the way data is written to the drives (striped) means that as one block of data has finished reading from the drive the second drive is prep'd ready to read the next block.

 

If you are installing your OS onto the array then i would suggest RAID 0. If you need loads of storage then I would suggest RAID 0 or leave them seperate. If you have really important data and dont want to loose it the RAID 1 is for you.

 

Hope this helps chris.

cheers for that, just need to make up my mind now lol

cheers for that, just need to make up my mind now lol

 

I am not as good with computers as you lot are but I have a raid card and I used to run 4 HD's in my computer the raid card held 2 and the motherboard the other 2. Is this the piece of kit you are looking for? If it is you can have my one as it isnt used any more?

cheers vin , i'm only using two drives and the MOBO has them already

only use raid 0 for drives you don't mind losing all the data on, yes it is faster - but you have no fault tolerance - which is the main reason for using raid.

 

Disks are cheap right now - so my rule of thumb is, raid 1 (mirroring) for safety - raid 5 good alrounder - great read performance, but poor write performance - raid 1+0 - great speed + safety.

only use raid 0 for drives you don't mind losing all the data on, yes it is faster - but you have no fault tolerance - which is the main reason for using raid.

 

Disks are cheap right now - so my rule of thumb is, raid 1 (mirroring) for safety - raid 5 good alrounder - great read performance, but poor write performance - raid 1+0 - great speed + safety.

I didnt mention raid 5 & 1+0 because he's only got 2 drives :)

Personnally i have used RAID 0 for about 2 years, it has never failed, i brought matching drives brand new just for safety.

i use 3 RADI0 arrays

 

2X300GB

2X500GB

4X1TB

 

never had a problem but my controler did go down once but i got everything back

i have 2 raptor drives in raid 0 as i want maxspeed and i never leave anything on my pc that i need, but i have never had a problem with raid 0

i have 2 raptor drives in raid 0 as i want maxspeed and i never leave anything on my pc that i need, but i have never had a problem with raid 0

 

for £200 then you could have 2X32gb ssd's in raid0 enought room for the os and what ever your playing

for £200 then you could have 2X32gb ssd's in raid0 enought room for the os and what ever your playing

 

Ultimate speed. Suppose to boot to windows in 10seconds off of those.

 

I would love some but cost quite a lot at the moment. Especially the new OCZ V2's

only use raid 0 for drives you don't mind losing all the data on, yes it is faster - but you have no fault tolerance - which is the main reason for using raid.

 

Disks are cheap right now - so my rule of thumb is, raid 1 (mirroring) for safety - raid 5 good alrounder - great read performance, but poor write performance - raid 1+0 - great speed + safety.

 

Not QUITE true... RAID1 can be just as fast as RAID0 for reading data, as it reads from both drives at once. Write performance in RAID1 is the same (actually, very slightly slower, but unnoticable on most machines) as a single drive as it has to write everything to both drives. I'd NEVER use RAID0 - just way too much chance to lose everything.

 

RAID5 is about the best to go for wherever possible though. You need a minimum of 3 disks, but it's a very fast, fault tolerant and industry standard setup.

I think i'll go for RAID 1 then , not sure i woul use 1Tb so 500Gb should be fine

Good luck with it mate :)