Any expert here know how to use on board raid? I know that u must use identical hdd for raid! But i have AS40G Quantum , which is hard for me to get another one at the moment!

Anyone tried raid with diff brand but identical 40G for instance? Pls help! Thx!

First of all you don't HAVE to have identical hard drives to raid them together, it is simply recommended. You may experience problems though when using two different hard drives, you'll just have to try it and see. I would try to get a second hard drive from the same manufactorer as the one you have now. You can have hard drives of different capacities also, but you will lose the space on the larger one.

For instance if you have a 30 and a 60 gig Raided together then you will only have 60 gig of hard drive space. You lose the extra 30 gig that were on the 60 gig hard drive.

If you have any questions on the raiding process just ask and I can try my best to help as I succeeded in raiding two IBM Deskstar's my first time!

Hey henrychieng,

I too have just finished a RAID setup with two IBM Deskstar 40 gig drives.

SuperCheetah is correct, the RAID will be only as big as the smallest drive and you will loose the remaining space, meaning that if you had a 60 and 40, you would have 80 total. The other 20 is gone forever (or until you reformat and take the RAID out of the picture).

As to your drive, I have seen several of these on ebay in the $80-100 range. This was one of the drives I was looking for before I settled for the IBM's. Try ebay first. I actually bought the 2 IBM's for not much more than one at a retail store. They both work fine and are covered under warrenty.

If you have anymore questions, let us know, we would be glad to answer them.

How many hard drives are you planning on putting in there?

What array? RAID0, RAID1, RAID2...

I've never used hard drives with such immense space, so I wouldn't know....

Raiding two hard drives together is usually reserved for high access servers and such, why are you planning on going Raid?

Hey thanks guys! In that case most likely i will source for 40G maxtor! ThD740X series! Seems like a good buy! Anyway, be trying out raid o on my MSIKT266 Pro Ru! Thanks guys!

What's RAID2 ?

I've heard of RAID 0 + 1, where you strip & mirror at the same time ( with a total of 4 HDDs :eek ).

Well...

RAID LEVEL 2 uses its grouped together instead of bytes, and these are interleaved across multiple disks. Ths is a rare method.

RAID LEVEL 3, simply uses 3 or more disks, and parity bits are stored in seperate, dedicated drives. It performs better.

RAID LEVEL 4 is similar to Level 3, but manages disks independently rather than in unison.

RAID LEVEL 5 is where data is striped across three or more drives for performance, and parity bits are used for fault tolerance. The parity bits from two drives are stored on a third drive.

RAID LEVEL 6 is similar to RAID 5, but does two different parity computations or the same computation on overlapping subsets of the data. It totally kicks ***.

RAID LEVEL 10 is a combination of RAID 1 and 0 (mirroring and striping).... This is VERY secure but uses a great number of disks.

RAID arrays these days, in larger servers, are often hot swappable, meaning that disks can be removed and replaced whilst the server is up and running. The controllers for these arrays are large PCI devices, some of which are the size of motherboards.

In my work, we use hot swappable RAID 5 arrays, which are probably the most common server solution. Servers having this kind of tech are usually SCSI only, have multiple CPUs (2, 4 or even 8 or 16) and have large amounts of RAM (1 or 2 GB of RAM or more....) These kinds of servers usually cost around £15,000 or more, which you can get a crappy flat in Scotland for.

Crappy flats are more expensive in Aberdeen, they go for about 25 - 30K

I've never really felt the need to use raid...
What benefits does it have for the home user and gamer?

Hey Vehementi,

Raid is a great way to get alittle extra performance out of two drives. Alot of the new boards have the ability to do raid 0 and 1 onboard with no special cards. I have the Giga-Byte GA-7DXR board with an onboard Promise controller and it was very easy to set up an array with it. It also gives you 8 channels to put devices on instead of the normal 4, preventing you from buying another card to take up another pci slot.

can i ask, will there be a slight performace increase if u use raid o in my MSIKT266 Pro Ru mtb? Said like 10%? or 20%?

I'm using XP1600 (unlock)but oc to Xp1900 with crucial 256mb! Using Quantum AS40G! Will i get another 10% increase in perf? Cheers!

Most raid 0 users will experience anywhere from a 20% all the way up to around 50% increase in performance depending on the system. So the answer to your question is yes, you should definitely see some quality improvement over your previous setup.

I recommend running some test like HDTach or Sandra or Madonion's new benchmark PCMark both before and after you raid and see what the differences are.

It might be faster but there are negative sides to it for a normal user. If you use stripping, you can no longer just take one of your drives to put on a seperate PC, unless it also has RAID in which case you still have to move both of your drives. The other problem is Data loss since the information is being split to two channels. Might want to look into that first.

20% to 50% WOW!:eek:

Really want to get the hand of it (raid 0)! Tnx guys for reconfirming the facts! Now i must source for a cheaper hdd in some comp garage !Cheers dude!

It's what we're here for. If you need any more help with raid or anything else just let us know. I also must say thanks to Arris for that indepth look into the different types of Raid.

Good luck on finding a good hard drive!!!

You might be interested in some of these articles about raid:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/0...906/index.html

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...ts/perf-c.html

http://www.hardware-one.com/reviews.asp?aid=202&page=10

Just to name a couple I found doing a quick search of my records. I'll more and better ones as I find them.

Thx! Will definitely check it out man!

I politely disagree.We discussed this in the old forum from an article @ www.maximumpc.com Although theory suggest a raid 0 would approach the speeds of scsi, test results showed a 7200rpm hd was almost as fast. Maximumpc was even befudled & conducting more test.

I'll quote these when I get some time.

That's the beauty of forum and i like the way u disagree things man!

If what u said is true, then i think i better save that couples of hundred for a nice meal or buy some gifts for my girlfrd! Haha!

Anyway, glad that u point out coz i haven't buy the hdd yet! Btw, show us more facts man! Thx n cheers!

I'm not saying RAID is bad. It's great! I only don't use it because I'm too broke to buy another hard drive and RAID controller, and I've never used it before, and so I wouldn't know what I'm doing.
20-50% is pretty drastic, it only speeds up hard drive access time, and sure if you do do splitting, games will run alot faster at the expense that half your data is on one drive while he other half is on a different one.
I'll ask my instructor what array he's using in the room's server (I'm currently studying A+), as I'd really like to learn more about it.
RAID is great for data backup too. Either RAID1 or 0 clones information and sends it to two drives, so if one fails you still got the other. Invaluable, simply invaluable.

[SIZE=1]p.s. You don't need to bold quote everything![/SIZE]