Anyone explain RAID?

wtf?

dont i feel like a ******* here lol what is RAID? is it jsut basically linking 2 hd's together into one?

...well if i dont ask i'll never learn lol :blush:

Thanks for the drive speeds, although I have never heard of mode 6, has this been around a while? I don't think many people are able to use this because even Western Digital don't have IDE ATA 133 to make use of 133MBps speeds.

When I posted my question on SATA drives, I meant I would want to setup two SATA RAID-0 seprately from my two IDE drives. Also, would two Seagate Barracuda's 7200.8 running in RAID-0 on a SATA give my system a big speed boost and what speeds could this achieve?

My case only holds two drives and was wondering what PC cases would hold just 4 drives. It would have to be black and the same height as my current case, 41cm. I don't mind at all if it's wider. I would appreciate advice, please.

I'll keep my two IDE 200Gb drives on my system for stuff like game patches, storage space for my digital video editing (learning the trade at the moment!) game movies, important file backups and a few thousand of my family's digital photos.

So if anyone has one of those new Seagate Barracuda's 7200.8 - please post your opinions here, thanks!

You've got to link two SATA drives (not the typical IDE) together that almost doubles your hard disk speed. RAID-0 is better. Once you've linked them, I think the two drives would be seen as one but with both drives capacities added together to give you a huge amount of space.

Also SATA uses very thin cables compared to the wide IDE cables. Some IDE cables restrict the air flow inside the PC whereas the SATA cables don't, plus they look great.

Hope that was easy to understand, if not, just ask away and someone will reply soon.

Maxtor has ATA-133 drives, they may be the only one. I don't see anybody following Maxtor with it now that Sata is here. My RAID PCI card is ata-133 and my new Gigabyte motherboard supports it.

Western Digital has some 10,000 RPM Sata Raptors.

Redundent-Array-of-Inexspensive-Disks
Real-world IDE RAID explored
What is raid

thanx guys i get it now :angel: never knew there was sumfin like that avalible as well lol i think i need to jump out the ages of windows 98

RAID Setup

I have a Dell Dimension 8400

with 1 80GB SATA150 HD

if I am going to a RAID 0 setup

1. Do I need a 2nd HD of the exact same size and type?
2. Do I need purchase a RAID controller card or is that function already on the Dell mobo?

Seagates are very reliable, and when not quickly replaced.

Dear Poster

I have multiple Seagate Barracuda drives, they are not as fast as the Hitachi/IBM Deskstars abut they are much much more reliable. Yes you will get a speed improvement using RAID 0, or RAID 0 + 1, you will get security with RAID 1, and (JOB which some call RAID 2, stands for 'Just One Big Disk'.

You can happily use any seagate (pair) in combination, try to get a pair with the additional CACHE (8MB for most drives above 80GB) and if you haven't used cached drives then you will need to tell WINDOWS to clear its cache before shutdown. This will prevent any lost data and the dreaded chkdsk routines from running at reboot, Try to partition the drives <= 100gb if you are using win9x or XP / 2000, before the latest service packs, else (even with the latest keep the partitions to <=132GB.)

One word of advice here, to help Windows and many other Windows and DOS, and Linux/ UNIX, tools 'see' the 'end' of the drive, try to always leave one data sector EMPTY at the END of the physical drive (not at every parition as some suggest).

You will be very unlikely to have any of the many WIndows BSOD if you do this, I don't know why, but Windows (since B&W, Win286... to WinXP 64bit) all seem to have this problem as do some versions of Linux/UNIX. So leave the last bit, it's usually only about 7.8mb anyway and for a stable system it's far better to do this, than waste hundreds of hours trying to recover drives that have suddenly 'grown' strange problems.

I have the following SEAGATE Drives (in multiple computer systems, from old 486s through to 3Ghz+)

2 x 17.2GB Seagate Barracuda's (can't remember exact model numbers)
These drives are approximately nine years old and still running perfectly.

4 x 28.8GB (Seagate always uses a bit in the formatting of the drive)
These are above 6 years old)

4 x 40GB ST400??
These drives are 4 years old

8 x 80GB 4 x SATA 4 x PATA (ST380021a {pata} ST380021S {SATA}
(many mirrored in raid setups on GA-7DXR / Ga-7VT880 - RZ)
(Asus A7880, Gigabyte K7 Triton mobo too .. note mobo US, 4 of 6 gigabyte mobos dead so note this! Asus mobos 100% running record since installing.)

4 x 120GB 2 x SATA 2x PATA
(as 80's above)

2 x 200GB barracudas (arriving on Monday.)

In Twenty years of using PCs I have only had two Seagate drives fail on me, both died within the gaurantee / warranty period and were immediatedly replaced, I live in the UK, the drive had to be posted to Holland and despite this and no Airmail the replacements both arrived in 7 days (less for one just 5 days). One drive that had died was a 10GB, it was replaced with one of the 17.GBs above, which was why I purchased another (to mirror for data backup). This is the best hard-drive customer service record I have come across, many other companies just give you the run around.

I have used literally hundreds of multiple other manufacturers drives for other people MAXTORs aren't bad, but I've had quite a few die on friends machines, (fitting them to their PCs at their specific requests, despite my advice against it) and many of the different manufacturers drives have failed, and in the most part all have later been replaced with seagates. I.e. Micropolis (SCSI BRICK 30GB) Connor [very bad], Maxtor, and many others.

The only others I have found seriuosly reliable are both the Hitachis, & IBMs (Hitachi also produce the IBMs) if you check their product names (e.g Deskstar etc.) they are nearly all the same.

I hope that this information is useful to you, if you have to return a drive try running all Seagates diagnostic software on it first (Seatools), and when preparing the drive (usually preformatted) for use on different or other systems, use only their tools (Disc Wizard) both are freely available from their web site. [see below]

Send them the generated reports, usually they can phone you with a software 'fix' or with details of how to get an RMA if required. i.e

http://www.grc.com (Spinrite) or

http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz/ for (bootmaster).

They also have a free HELP file (with font to display it properly) with all the jumper settings for ALL their drives and everything they have made to date, download the latest Seagate version of (disk referencer).

http://www.seagate.com goto Support downloads FREE software.

I hope that you find this information useful.

Cheers

John

Ok, I can understand why businesses & organisations would use a RAID setup, but seriously, is it really neccessary for people at home to use it? I mean, with external HDD's & DVD-RW's etc on the market you can back-up everything you have without having a mirror-image of your HD. How often do u think people at home would need to rip out their HD & quickly replace it with a mirrored copy while their pc is still running?! Seems like a waste of time & $$$ to me but hey ... what do I know?! :giddy:

Or is RAID used for a more conventional purpose at home? Could anyone please shed a little light on this theory? No disrespect to anyone at home using a RAID setup!! Always eager to learn here guys :grinthumb

RAID Is G8

I've had my two new 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA NCQ 7,200rpm 16MB Cache hard drives for just a month and it's great. Even though they have replaced my two 200GB Western Digital Caviar ATA drives, I've put them into my work PC to replace two 40GB drives that were really really slow.

I've put my new SATA drives in RAID 0 array because I demand speed with playing FPS like Half-Life 2 that use to take up to a minute to load (now takes just 15 seconds) and various other games, plus I require RAID 0 for digital video editing and audio creation.

My RAID array is split up into these partitions: (1) 51Gb for main system files & OS even though it takes up just 11Gb. Should have made it just 30Gb (2) 280Gb for programs, games and application. Takes up just 37Gb (3) 270Gb for all my storage stuff like patches, mods, speedruns, digital photos. Mostly just slack for Premiere Pro movie editing. This takes up about 77Gb. I know this brings the total to 601Gb - which doesn't add up - but most drives have more or less than stated.

It's worked like a dream and I would recommend people to set up most SATA drives in RAID 0 and make the most of the speeds on offer - I got 141MBps from HD Tach. It's only the 10k Western Digital Raptors that can beat my two drives. This is probably because of NCQ (native Command Queing.

when I bought my drives it quoted speeds of up to 150MBps which is 1.5GBps - so why aren't I getting 150Mb and why have they quoted 1.5GBps as well? I understand the 150Mbps speeds but how do they calculate 1.5Gbps speeds. It's like the SATA2 is 300Mbps = 3Gbps. I think i'm missing the point competely with these speeds.

The joy will be short lived when the mighty SATA2 standard comes in later this year with 300Mbps speeds.

Hi. I have Asus P4V8X-X mobo and 2 80GB Seagate Barracuda SATA setup in RAID1 (done as written in the mobo manual). I installed Windows 2000 and the VIA RAID Utility (came with the mobo driver CD) on the primary drive. Does this mean that my mirror drive is always have the same content as the master drive or do I still have to sync the drives every now and then?

Please help. Thanks!

A RAID 1 setup as oppose to a RAID 0 is one that just copies data from one drive to the other like a backup, only that it's much faster and works on the fly. Unless one of your drives fails, you'll always have the same content on both drives. This is how low-cost servers work do you get less down-time.

By the way, why do you need to have a RAID 1 setup? Do you run mission critical event programs, etc? If you play the latest games like me just have it a RAID 0 array with faster speeds and double capacity of your RAID 1 setup (160Gb). This is called striping - where data is split across the two drives unlike RAID 1 that copies itself to both.

I'm sure other members on this board will have more answers to give you and I'm sure you'll be wanting some points cleared up. Gald to assist.

Hi. Thanks for the reply. I need to backup data from one drive to the other.

There Are Better Backup Methods.

Try using a USB2/FireWire 400/800 external drive. Capacities are pretty huge now (2TB+) and are constantly getting cheaper. Use the backup software that comes with your drive to back the whole drive up or use an imaging program like Drive Image that'll copy your drive EXACTLY as it is - bit for bit.

If you continue using RAID-1 to mirror, then if you get infected by a virus for example, there's nothing stopping it gobbling up all your data.

If you do use an external drive, schedule regular backup perdiods every month. So your drive will contain multiple backups like January Backups, February Backups, March Backups... So if one backup is either incorrect or didn't backup correctly - you'll have more to choose from. I would recommend no more than 5 backups to keep at a time. Once you reach the 5th one, just delete the oldest and start a more updated one.

If your drive is just 80GB, then get a external drive of 500Gb. I know it adds up to 400Gb but once you have formatted it, you might end up with just 350Gb.

Hope this helps

Redundant Array of Independent / Inexpensive Disks ..
Inexpensive ... maybe not

RAID=Redundent Array of Inexpensive Disks
RAID 0, combines areas of free space from up to 32 multiple hard disks into one logical volume. This volume optimizes performance by allowing data to be written to all the disks at the same rate. This volume is not fault-tolerant as well so if one disk in the volume fails, then all the data is lost
RAID 1 Disk duplexing eliminates the single point of failure that exists in disk mirroring. This is done by adding another disk controller and configuring the RAID system to duplicate data on disk drives that are attached to two different disk controllers. There is generally no significant performance difference between disk mirroring and disk duplexing. The user is just adding further redundancy in the form of a second controller. The overhead of RAID 1 duplexing is 50 percent.
RAID 5 requires a minimum of three disk drives to implement. The disk drives that comprise a RAID 5 solution are often referred to as a RAID 5 array. The failure of a single disk drive does not cause the network server to fail. The missing information that was on the failed disk can be recreated quickly using the information on the remaining disks. The failed disk drive should be replaced as quickly as possible. RAID 5 cannot survive the failure of a second disk drive after one disk drive has failed. Because of this fact, some RAID systems allow for the configuration of a "hot spare" disk drive in the RAID system. A hot spare disk drive is powered up and running, but it contains no data. It is just waiting for a drive in the disk array to fail so that it can be used.
RAID 0/1, which is sometimes called RAID 0+1 or RAID 10, involves mirroring or duplexing two RAID 0 arrays. This yields the fault tolerance of RAID 1 and the input/output speed of RAID 0.

RAID Controller Over Motherboard's Controller?

Would a SATA Raid Controller be better for getting a performance boost for my 2 SATA Maxtor DiamondMax10 HDs over the motherboards controller and boost the fps in games?

In HD Tach I get 139Mbps but is it possible to reach the quoted SATA speeds of 150mbps?

My motherboard is MSI MS-6741 v1.0 and the BIOS is American Megatrends Inc. v.07.00T (04/02/01). I'm reluctant to update my BIOS because i've been told by 'experts' that it shouldn't be done unless there is already a problem with it. For the people that have updated their BIOS, how many times have you done it on the same motherboard?

I have updated my 2 DVD NEC 3520 drives to unlock the rip speeds, so I do have 'some' flashing experience.

SATA is faster than PATA (IDE) so SATA RAID should be faster than the IDE RAID. SATA is 150 mbps and IDE is only 100 or 133 mbps. You will only hit 150 mbps in bursts. I've flashed my current motherboard several times. If your motherboard has boot block or dual BIOS you have a safety net in case the flash goes bad. The second backup BIOS will take over and let you recover and try the flash again. If you know what your doing the only danger is a power failure or power bump in the middle of the flash.

just did my first IDE raid 0 today when I overhauled my system. I kept getting blue screen errors on a driver so it got so annoying I decided to reformat my hard disks. I had fogotten my motherboard supports RAID so I thought I would try it. It was a litle tricky because my floppy with the raid drivers was flakey and I had to do a traditional install, copy my floppy to a good disk, then reinstall with BIOS and driver changes to force a RAID 0. overall, the throughput increase isn't phenominal, but its somewhat of an improvement - perhaps 15 to 20% gain in speed.

RAID Install

Tedster - good to hear you managed to successfully setup your HD to RAID because when I got my two Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA HDs, I had to download over 120Mb of drivers & stuff (MaxBlast 4 For Windows) to enable RAID rather than the typical setup. The drives were bought as OEM from Komplett - they're pretty cheap for most stuff

I bought the drives, intending to use them for performance gaming and using Adobe Premiere. At the time of buying, I found the load times of levels in Half-Life 2 a pain where it would sometimes take up to a minute to load, it now loads in about 15-20 seconds, very reasonable. Having plenty of RAM - 1GB 2700DDR in my case - stops it caching to the HD and slowing my games down.

I'm saving up gradually now for a new system based on dual-core (or tri-core if i'm slow on the take-up) and getting the newer SATAII drives. I haven't seen any reviews of benchmarks with a couple of these drives in RAID-0 - if anyone has seen some then please post the results here - so i can see if there is much benefit to be made or I could be wasting money. Thanx