Can someone explain how to enable RAID and what purpose it has?

[mr. nails]

Do you really need raid on you pc Mr Nails? no

Do you have data that there is no way to back up? no

Do you use your pc for Business? no

If you want raid on you pc ,just so you have it. Its kind of a waste, If you don't understand what you are doing. how is that? when i first built my first pc 6 years ago i didn't know what i was doing. now, i've built over 1000 pc's. i just have never did any with raid. sorry.

My suggestion is to hookup with A network admin hopefully you know one and have him varify what hardware you have or what you will need to purchase. no need to. i know what i need and have. just configuring what i've asked in this thread is where i'm ignorant.

Have him/her install everything and have you watch. hands on is better.

Failing this, go to your library and get a Network + book this is where I would start there. Just read up on raid. i need to do this anyway.

I am not trying to be mean, but I think your results based on what the rest of us have been explaining is just going to get you in trouble.it's all good. i think raid 0 is the way for me to go. i'll experiment with that and see if i can cope with how loud it is in exchange with the performance gain like clocker spoke of. if it's so bad as everyone has said for ur raid to fail on you it will be ok for me. my raid will consist of my os and games. if that crashes i don't really care. i've lost nothing.

i just wanted some insight on where to start. thanks enough.

[clocker]

I think the experience setting it up is valuable and the "dangers" of data loss are over-exaggerated.
Go for it and decide for yourself.

At worst, you've wasted some time.
At best, you'll notice a definite improvement.

Given that this is a non mission critical PC I don't think you have much to lose.

[1Bullet]

Ok We are getting some where,You don't care if you have problems. You just want to do it and you seem to be capable in carring it out . You know that you want raid O. I would suggest raid 6 but I am not you. Raid 6 is more common on servers or even 5 for fault tolerance. But for getting your feet wet, go for raid 0. you could also expand on it to raid 0+1.

You probablly can use you existing pc(pending need specs) post spec. What is you mother board and processer.You are going to need Identical HDD's I suggest anythin in multiples of 40 gb( 40, 80,120,200).Stay away from 60, 100gb as failure rate is higher. some good buys right now on seagate 320 gb at about $115.00 each.

You will be writing data to say 3 HHD ( I am going to try to demonstate this on this page may not work).
It didn't pretend periods are not there.

...................................................................../ ------ HHD 1 .>> ( 0,3,6 Data)
................................................................... /
.......*Your File ........................... Data ...... /
.. 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7, >>Data-------- Writes--< --------- HDD2 .>> (1,4,7 Data)
..................................................Across ..... \
.................................................................... \
...................................................................... \ ------ HDD3 .>> ( 2,5 Data)

*Your data is actualy wriiiten in binary 0's and 1's but numbers were used to demonstrate. Wow you should see what I saw to do this.


Because all you data is written accross 3 drive and because the is no fault tolerence If you loose 1 drive Everything is lost.

I would suggest you use an addition HDD or PC for you operating system because of this. You may loose you data but still have a pc.
If you had built in fault tolerence this would not be needed.


We have now started a starting point, so if you need more assistance with raid 0. I will keep checking back.

[clocker]

I would suggest you use an addition HDD or PC for you operating system because of this. You may loose you data but still have a pc.

That seems completely backasswards.
RAID the OS and save data to a non-RAID drive.

[1Bullet]

I would suggest you use an addition HDD or PC for you operating system because of this. You may loose you data but still have a pc.

That seems completely backasswards.
RAID the OS and save data to a non-RAID drive.

Agreed ( if there was fault tolerence) ,but if he looses a HDD will still have on operating system and have no data .

The opreating system should have fault tolerence and there isn't with Raid 0.

Another question for mr nails to answer do you want an operating system if a HDD fails.

[mr. nails]

the chances of both hdd's going out in raid 0 are nil and if one goes out i'll just replace the defective one. to answer ur ?, no i don't need an os. i mean sure i do, but i don't really care if i lose it becuz of a hdd failure. hdd's are cheap enough for me to just purchase another one and reconstruct (i have all sensitive material backed up anyway). no big deal. i'm in a similar situation right now. i have 1 hdd partitioned for os and games and another hdd for storage. if my master fails, well i'll have to replace it. so, there are no worries and am prepared for any malfunction that cumz my way.

[1Bullet]

the chances of both hdd's going out in raid 0 are nil and if one goes out i'll just replace the defective one. to answer ur ?, no i don't need an os. i mean sure i do, but i don't really care if i lose it becuz of a hdd failure. hdd's are cheap enough for me to just purchase another one and reconstruct (i have all sensitive material backed up anyway). no big deal. i'm in a similar situation right now. i have 1 hdd partitioned for os and games and another hdd for storage. if my master fails, well i'll have to replace it. so, there are no worries and am prepared for any malfunction that cumz my way.

that is were your wrong, there is no fault tolerence with raid 0 if you loose one harddrive you have lost both.You may able to find fragment of intact files but I doubt you would even find that.That would be done thru a data recovery requiring an addition HDD for the 2 you need to salvage or, all data on both drives would be useless. With half of the operating system on the failed drive,the operating system is gone now too. Also you will have figure out which harddrive to replace. or do replace both.

I could be wrong but sounds like you think your getting mirroring, you are not!! you are writing all data across the 2 harddrives the data is mapped . If you have a movie file it is on both drives in fragments , when you watch the movie, it is read from both drives. This is were your perforamce comes from. You are getting performance only.

Again I don't care if this is just an expermint, but if you do have have a failure everything is gone.Then figure out which drive to replace, guess wrong do it twice, and reinstall operating system again set up drivers and programs again.

You may not have a HHD failure, but there is no guarentee either.

still need your spec's


If you go this route just make sure you have no critical info (pictures, home movies)Make sure it backed up(dvd/cd) cause in the event of a failure on one HDD and only one, all is gone.

[1Bullet]

I should probably edit and add onto the above, but I wont, unlike taking you pc and adding another HHD, to /C: to get a /D: if partition, or a large /C: if not partitioned most data will usually cluster to one drive( I did not say allways) because it depends on how fragmented your drive is with invalid short cuts, pagefiles and incomplete program uninstals. With raid it will be on both drives you don't want these clusters as mention above, you want the speed of writing to both disc. You really do want clusters of only half of data on each HHD to improve your read/write speed. If you look at my diagram above just take out the third HHD and split the numbers across the drives, and your operating system is now included in data now as well.

[mr. nails]

no, that's not where i'm wrong. i'm not mirroring anything. all i was saying is if 1 of those 2 hdd's really fails, crashes, or just goes caput... i'll just throw in another drive and format and start over. that's not a problem to me. all files i have to make my os run i already have backed up and if i lose my games i don't really care. i mostly just play fps' anyway and i have my cfg's for those backed up already. sorry if i worded that wrong, but what u've just posted isn't what i meant.

i haven't even started my new build yet to give u my specs. i'm pretty much waiting on a decent mb that i like to cum out for what i plain on doing for my next build. preferably 680i chipset. then it will start.