Using 2 Hard Drives...

[NeVeRmiNd]

I have an ASUS P4S533-MX Rev. 2.0 motherboard and 2 Western Digital 40 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drives, I wanted to know if I could write to both Hard Drives at the same time (that's called RAID right?) I am currenty using them as 2 seperate storage areas where I ahve to choose which one to install somehting on and it installs on one. Can I write to both at the same time like RAID? I saw that when I installed WInXP it saud press F6 to install a third party device or setup RAID. Can I do this? I need to know before I reinstall WinXP for this.....

[Staz]

Nope your board doesn't support RAID. But if you want it you could get a PCI card that supports it.

[XeroHouR]

Raid is actually differnt things. You can use striping or bianary(this might not be the common name for it) If you set them up in (i think) its raid0 it read them both as 1 disk and it trades off writing the same info across 2 drives, ergo its faster. Parity means it writes to both disks, for redudancy if one disk fails you have a backup.

[NeVeRmiNd]

Anyone have a RAID card they are selling? Would the Hard DRive work with RAID or does it have to be a special HD?

[robbie]

Hummmmm......... I do..............
Rob

[Staz]

Oh Man I hate to say this when you have over 400 post but here it comes:

GO PUT AN ADD IN THE WANTED SECTION OF THE CLASSIFIEDS!

sorry for yelling.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independant Disk. There are several diferent modes to a RAID set up. IIRC there is RAID0 where you have 2 disk that must be the same speed, the controller writes half of the information to one disk and half to the other. If you use two 40GB disk total storage space will equal 80GB. Then you have RAID1 which requires 2 disk of the same size, it will write all the information to both disk which give an automatic back up. If you use two 40GB disk total storage will be 40GB. Then there is RAID0+1 which requires 4 disk of the same size and speed, it write half the info to 2 disk and the other half to the other 2. It give you the speed increase of RAID0 with the redundancy of RAID0 and it's only draw back is that you need 4 drives almost identicle and a PSU able to handle 4 drives spinning up at once. Finnally there is RAID5 which allows you to use any number of 1 to 4 disk as 1 large HDD. I am not sure what the bennifit of this is other than convienence of only having a C drive. Also there is a mode that will let you use the ports as standard IDE ports but I don't remember what it is called. I am sure Adean will come behind me and correct me or point out what I missed (man that guy knows his stuff).

All RAID controllers are like IDE controllers as in they will support a certain speed and or type of drive. RAID 100 contollers can use ATA100 disk or can use ATA133 disk but will only run them at ATA100. A RAID 133 controller can use ATA100 drives but will only run them at ATA100 or it can use ATA133 and run them at ATA133. SATA150 RAID controllers are for SATA drive.

Hope this helps.

[mookydooky]

RAID levels and what they're good for:

RAID 0: Striping without parity. Striping is basically reading data consecutively off of multiple drives. Imagine moving blocks from one pile to the middle using one hand. The speed is limited by your hand speed. Now imagine having two piles of blocks and you can use both hands to move the blocks to the middle. You could theoretically do the work twice as fast. This concept can be be done over any number of drives. The risk of course, is drive failure and data loss and corruption. You're increasing the risk by a factor of X, where X is the number of drives.

RAID 1: Mirror. RAID 1 is the most basic of RAIDs. It's basic redundancy where all data is identically written to multiple drives. In the event of hardware failure, you're back up very quickly (some controllers even do it on the fly) because everything has been backed up already.

RAID 2-3-4: ECC (Error checking code) and parity. By adding extra bits to the end of data, it possible to both check for errors and also repair errors. RAID 2 allowed for on the fly reconstruction of data in the event of disk failure while at the same time, offering some performance gain by striping the data. This was done by dedicating disks for parity. RAID 2 however, tended to be very disk hungry and thus they came up with RAID 3. RAID 3 moved on to byte level data. Larger data chunks allow for better performance. It also used a better ECC scheme using XOR. RAID 3's basic problem was the dedicated parity drive. RAID 3's performance wasn't has good as it could be because of all the writes to the parity drive. RAID 4 is basically RAID 3 but the data size is much larger now. RAID 4 uses whole files instead of bytes. This allows really fast read speeds since multiple files could be accessed at once.

RAID 5-6: Striping and parity in one big package. Imagine RAID 3, but instead of a dedicated parity disk, where bottlenecks occur, you spead the ECC over multiple disks. Real world performance is close to RAID 0, but with parity using XOR ECC. In the event of a disk failure, RAID 5 can rebuild the data on the fly depending on the controller's capabilities. You can even hotswap disk and have the controller rebuild the drive using the parity bits on the other disks. Pretty fancy stuff. RAID 6 builds on RAID 5 by adding an addition parity set. With RAID 6, it's possible to have two drives go down the toilet and still be able to rebuild the data.

[NeVeRmiNd]

Lol, I'm gonna have to read these posts over like 5 times....lol. But can I use RAID with my two 40 GB hard drives? What RAID would I use to write to both disks (split up data not backup) and have a total of 80 GB space? Can I do this with my HArd Drive and RObbie wanna trade the RAID card?

[NeVeRmiNd]

Wow. those post's are confusing

[XeroHouR]

use raid0

[NeVeRmiNd]

My HD's will support it? I thought you had to have a special HD....no? (Omg.....I sound like a total newbie to comps, but I am, just to RAID though...lol)

[mookydooky]

Originally Posted by NeVeRmiNd

Lol, I'm gonna have to read these posts over like 5 times....lol. But can I use RAID with my two 40 GB hard drives? What RAID would I use to write to both disks (split up data not backup) and have a total of 80 GB space? Can I do this with my HArd Drive and RObbie wanna trade the RAID card?

Most of the RAID levels will be unavailable to you in a simple PCI card. The higher levels tend to be for enterprise systems for mission critical data that can't suffer any downtime. Most basic RAID cards will offer RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 (basically RAID 1 and RAID 0 combined), and JBOD.

For what you want to do, here are your options:

1) Just use the disks seperately. You will have two drives, each with a max partition size of 40GB for a total of 80GB.

2) Set up a striping, RAID 0, array. This will give you a max partition size of 80GB. It will also (depending on the controller) greatly improve HD performance, sustained transfers could be up to twice as fast. There will be a small hit to your CPU, but it's mostly negligible. The major concern is that you are now twice as likely to have disk failure, and the data will be virtually unrecoverable in the event of failure.

3) Setup a JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) array. This will also give you a max partition size of 80GB. This is basically the opposite of partitioning. Instead of creating multiple logical drives out of one HD, you're creating a single logical drive out of many. There is no performance gain over using two disks in a non-array. The risk of failure is also twice as great as in RAID 0. Data recovery however, is much easier than with a striped array.

[mookydooky]

Originally Posted by NeVeRmiNd

My HD's will support it? I thought you had to have a special HD....no? (Omg.....I sound like a total newbie to comps, but I am, just to RAID though...lol)

RAID functions are independent of the HD. You don't need special HDs, that was the original purpose of RAID, to basically use cheap generic disks to build large high performance arrays. Ideally, you want to use identical HDs, but it usually doesn't matter. The way most controllers work, if you have different HDs, performance will match the slower drive(s). If your drives are of different sizes in a striped or redundant array (but not a JBOD array), you lose the extra space on the larger drive.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by mookydooky

3) Setup a JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) array. This will also give you a max partition size of 80GB. This is basically the opposite of partitioning. Instead of creating multiple logical drives out of one HD, you're creating a single logical drive out of many. There is no performance gain over using two disks in a non-array. The risk of failure is also twice as great as in RAID 0. Data recovery however, is much easier than with a striped array.

Errr..........on every controller I've ever used that supported it, JBOD was how you implemented a bunch of single disks. They weren't part of an array. Each drive appeared independently to the OS, and so you could format and partition them just as you would any normal drive. Note that some controllers implement the concept of JBOD as a single drive in a RAID 0 configuration (a RAID 0 with one stripe).

[NeVeRmiNd]

I have to re-install WinXP to set up RAID? Will I have to activate Windows again? And will the same Product Key work? Or will it say it's already used?

[NeVeRmiNd]

I hope I dont need another CD key.

[robbie]

Originally Posted by NeVeRmiNd

Lol, I'm gonna have to read these posts over like 5 times....lol. But can I use RAID with my two 40 GB hard drives? What RAID would I use to write to both disks (split up data not backup) and have a total of 80 GB space? Can I do this with my HArd Drive and RObbie wanna trade the RAID card?

Yep.
Rob

[weldzilla]

i use a raid0 array myself. not to sure with a pci version of raid0 you have to re-run win XP since it is not native on the board. But, rather a truly 3rd party setup. you might want to investigate this further. I never really thought about it, til now.

WZ

[robbie]

All you have to do is hit F6 when it asks you during your WinXP install. (so yes your going to have to reinstall) I did and I HAD to call MS as they didn't like that I changed HD's, they asked why, I said I went RAID, they said........... OK here's your new #
Rob

[weldzilla]

Well all in all that was pretty easy. So get your pci powered controller nevermind and give it a go!

WZ