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

i searched these forums and most info about RAID is over 1 year old and i know RAID has come up in the world since then. i also googled for info on RAID and that info is over 2 years old. can someone explain the different types of RAID (1-5 or whatever) and then explain the purposes behind them? i have never did RAID be4 and am considering doing so in my next build. granted that i find it necessary. do you still need a floppy drive for the installation of RAID? i will be using a MB with RAID onboard with SATA. pretty much all i know about RAID at this time is that it's enabled from within the BIOS and one of the RAID's config is 2 drives seen as 1 for performance or something and then 3 drives mirroring or what not. lol. that's about it. thorough explaination is GREATLY appreciated. thx!

RAID, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, is a technology that uses multiple hard drives to increase the speed of data transfer to and from hard disk storage, and also to provide instant data backup and fault tolerance for any information you might store on a hard drive.

The hard drives are joined in an array (a single logical drive, as far as the operating system is concerned) and all disks share the data written to them in some form. There are several different implementations, or 'levels' of RAID, ranging from RAID 0 to RAID 53.

The common factor that all RAID levels share is the use of a hardware or software RAID controller that intercepts data intended for storage on the logical hard drive. "Logical" being the hard drive space that the operating system sees as a drive letter, C:\ for example.

This data is then either duplicated by the controller for storage on multiple drives in the array at once ('mirroring'), or broken down into smaller chunks which are then divided between the available drives in the RAID array ('striping'). The terminology that is going to be important to understand from here on in is:

RAID array: A group of hard drives linked together as a single logical drive. Must be connected to one or more hardware RAID controllers, or be attached normally to a computer using a RAID capable operating system, such as Windows XP Professional.

Striping: A procedure in which data sent to a RAID array is broken down and portions of it written to each drive in the array. This can dramatically speed up hard drive access when the data is read back, since each drive can transfer part of the data simultaneously.

Mirroring: A procedure in which data sent to a RAID array is duplicated and written onto two or more drives at once.

By breaking down the data and sharing it amongst two or more drives, higher performance can be achieved, especially when reading data back, as each drive can transfer its portion of the required data simultaneously. Of course, striping data on two or more drives actually reduces reliability, since if a single drive in the array fails, all data is lost as each physical hard disk only contains a fragment of the data which is useless without the rest. To combat this problem, a third RAID technology is used called Parity.

RAID 1: Mirrored Disk Array A mirrored disk array is composed of a set of two physical hard drives, each of which contains a full copy of all data sent to the logical drive that represents the array. This has a couple of advantages; first of all, any data stored on a RAID 1 array is completely and automatically backed up, and in the event of the failure of one drive, the other can be substituted without a hitch. Secondly, data can be read from both drives simultaneously.

RAID 5:stripes both data and parity information across three or more drives. It is similar to RAID 4 except that it exchanges the dedicated parity drive for a distributed parity algorithm, writing data and parity blocks across all the drives in the array. This removes the "bottleneck" that the dedicated parity drive represents, improving write performance slightly and allowing somewhat better parallelism in a multiple-transaction environment, though the overhead necessary in dealing with the parity continues to bog down writes. Fault tolerance is maintained by ensuring that the parity information for any given block of data is placed on a drive separate from those used to store the data itself. The performance of a RAID 5 array can be "adjusted" by trying different stripe sizes until one is found that is well-matched to the application being used.

RAID 6 can be thought of as "RAID 5, but more". It stripes blocks of data and parity across an array of drives like RAID 5, except that it calculates two sets of parity information for each parcel of data. The goal of this duplication is solely to improve fault tolerance; RAID 6 can handle the failure of any two drives in the array while other single RAID levels can handle at most one fault. Performance-wise, RAID 6 is generally slightly worse than RAID 5 in terms of writes due to the added overhead of more parity calculations, but may be slightly faster in random reads due to spreading of data over one more disk. As with RAID levels 4 and 5, performance can be adjusted by experimenting with different stripe sizes.

RAID 7 isn't an open industry standard; it is really a trademarked marketing term of Storage Computer Corporation, used to describe their proprietary RAID design. (I debated giving it a page alongside the other RAID levels, but since it is used in the market, it deserves to be explained; that said, information about it appears to be limited.) RAID 7 is based on concepts used in RAID levels 3 and 4, but greatly enhanced to address some of the limitations of those levels. Of particular note is the inclusion of a great deal of cache arranged into multiple levels, and a specialized real-time processor for managing the array asynchronously. This hardware support--especially the cache--allow the array to handle many simultaneous operations, greatly improving performance of all sorts while maintaining fault tolerance. In particular, RAID 7 offers much improved random read and write performance over RAID 3 or RAID 4 because the dependence on the dedicated parity disk is greatly reduced through the added hardware. The increased performance of RAID 7 of course comes at a cost. This is an expensive solution, made and supported by only one company.

Redundancy Technique: Mirroring vs. Parity

The technique used to provide redundancy in a RAID array is a primary differentiator between levels. Redundancy is provided in most RAID levels through the use of mirroring or parity (which is implemented with striping):

Mirroring: Single RAID level 1, and multiple RAID levels 0+1 and 1+0 ("RAID 10"), employ mirroring for redundancy. One variant of RAID 1 includes mirroring of the hard disk controller as well as the disk, called duplexing.
Striping with Parity: Single RAID levels 2 through 7, and multiple RAID levels 0+3 (aka "53"), 3+0, 0+5 and 5+0, use parity with striping for data redundancy.
Neither Mirroring nor Parity: RAID level 0 is striping without parity; it provides no redundancy
Both Mirroring and Striping with Parity: Multiple RAID levels 1+5 and 5+1 have the "best of both worlds", both forms of redundancy protection.
The exact way that striping with parity is implemented depends on the particulars of the level as well. Some levels involve striping of individual bytes or sectors, while others use larger blocks; in the latter case, the size of the blocks is controlled by the stripe size of the array. RAID 2 uses a special form of striping with parity that is actually more like the ECC encoding used to protect data on various computer devices.

sorry if this is out of order cause I cant remember what it type before.

Most servers will be set up to use a form of raid with hot swap hard drives, that right they can remove a hard drive and if they using raid 6 they would not loose any data because the remaining hard drive by striping with parity would have the data on them from the failed hard drive. Loose 2 hard drives you will loose data.

You wouldn't you raid to back up everything only major important data, example the operating system, payables account receivables personal files all confidential files.Depends on the number of servers a company is running.

Everything else would be handled thru weekly to daily backups with one of three types of back ups.


If you were going to use raid it would be poinless unless you where using raid 6 with a minimum of 3 hard drives.

If you are still reading why would you want to use raid ? Because you can't afford to loose your Data.

How to set up on a pc. Buy a mother board that supports serial ata and set one hard drive to mirror the other one. Then if one fails then you have a back up of the orginal drive. You may(most likely) have to load a raid driver prior to installing windows. Windows is stupid when it comes to raid.

I do this for a living, and my PC has serial ata ,but I don't mirror my other drive.
I just back up important things onto DVD's or CD's.

If your still thinking of raid look into a hot site that way you will never loose your data.

lol, a good read, but most of what i read is over my head. is it possible for someone to break down what each RAID lvl does simplified? parity? redundancy? stripes? where's RAID 0?

RAID 1 = 2 HDD's mirroring each other (2x200gb = 200gb) so if u lose one hdd just slap in another and no problem? also, this is like hyperthreading? 2 HDD's acting like 1 HDD for faster performance?

thank you for this info as i'm trying to figure this out. lol, maybe easier to get hands on. which i would if i had a practice pc.

mirroring is 2 hard drives,(or more, or server to server ,one server mirrors another) one is active and one is mirroring. you loose the first harddrive and the second is switch to be active.the faulty hard drive is replaced and the mirrors the active hard drive.

stripping is for example 3 harddrives (you must have 3 or more),and lets say they are 300 Gb. A portion of each hard drive 100 GB is partitioned, all are active and receiving parts of the data on the 200 GB partition.The more hard drives the smaller the stripe (6 harddrives would only be 50 Gb)
So we have harddrive #1,#2 and #3.
#1 and #2(in there 100Mb partion) a have the data thats is on #3, #2 and #3 have the data that is on #1. So you have a total of 900 Gb of hard drive, but you are only able to use 600 mb for active storage. the other 300 Gb is only for back up.
If you lost #2 hard drive, replace it and the data on #1 and #3 would rebuild # 2. Loose #1 and #2 your out of luck unless you were mirroring with another server. And it would only be mirroring the 600 Gb.

parity refers to the checking whether data has been lost or written over when it's moved from one hard drive to another or when transmitted between computers.

here is a list of RAID
Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
RAID S: EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems.

How you determine what raid level to use is usually by how much money you have, again not common on PC's but on servers. We would not be talking about 300GB hard drives but 1 terabyte hard drives.

By the way lets keep Hyper Threading out of it . In my opinon it was a farse done by Intel. Anyone using it with Xp home that say it is great, is full of it, because it is not supported.

Just read your post again.

Raid is all about protecting the data (Fault Tolerence), not about performance. Your raid level will be based on the amount of money you have to protected the data from being lost.The more money you spend will improve the performance protecting the data.

If you are planiing on building a pc and you are thinking of using Serial ATA Hard drives you will not be intrested in doing any of the above. You will load your Raid driver from a floppy prior to your software install. with serial ata on your motherboard you will have the option now to having 4 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives.

Wow bullet, that pretty much blew my mind! Very Nice. Here's what I found in a recent article at Tom's Hardware (plus my own interpretations). It's only a few explained but I think any of the others would be irrelevant to a home build.

• RAID 0 (striping) divides data into chunks that are spread across two (or more) drives at the same time, providing up to double the transfer rate and the combined capacity of both drives. The major drawback is that if either hard drive fails, then you just lost everything. (Essentially, nothing is backed up, it just goes faster and you keep all your storage space, 2x200gb = 400gb! Beware if one drive dies).
• RAID 1 mirrors two (or more) drives so that if one fails, data can be recovered from the other. The major drawback here is that because both drives store the same data, the available capacity is half of the total capacity of the drives. (Like you were saying before, 2x200gb = 200gb, and there's no performance gain, it's all about security).
• RAID 0+1 allows four (or more) drives to be set up as a mirrored set of striped drives. If one striped set fails, data can be retrieved from the other, but total capacity is still limited to that of one striped set. (the speed of RAID 0 and security of RAID 1 together, but you need four hard drives!$! 4x200gb = 400gb)
• RAID 5 creates parity bits (which requires processing power and can slow down your computer!) for data recovery. Data and parity bits are distributed across all drives, increasing transfer rate, while sacrificing only the amount of space required to store the added parity bits (the capacity of one drive in the set)... Here's how my simpleton mind wraps itself around this one: The raid controller compresses your shit to fit on one hard drive as back up and all the other drives work together sorta like a RAID 0. So you'd need at least 3 drives, 3x200gb = 400gb. The bad part is when you're writing to the hard drives it eats up computer resources 'compressing' down stuff (see: creating parity bits) to go on the one backup drive. But while reading, it should be faster.

So that's pretty much the way I understand it... and bullet, feel free to to clarify if I've screwed it up.

As far as swapping out failed drives, I couldn't answer that since I've been lucky enough in my limited RAIDing experience to never have one fail. And yeah, the whole floppy routine during installation still applies. Not quite sure if that's changed any with vista.

For the record, I roll with a RAID 0 and manually backup music, pictures and the such on a third external drive.

lol! Looks like bullet beat me to the punch and published another RAID manual while I was trying to stumble through my comparatively meager thoughts on the subject. Oh well, maybe it'll be of some use, haha!

thx guys. a lot of my questions have been answered and i appreciate it. i just like to know stuff like this my my own info and it's good to know just in case u actually have to do it later down the road for some reason. u guys keep saying RAID is for protection and business' and stuff. why do so many of these ppl on this forum use RAID on their home systems then? same as stated above? lol, i really never saw a reason for myself to ever use RAID, but need to do it a couple of times so i can say i can do it and have. dito? any more valuable info out there plz share with us! thx.

Now for the KISS explanation of the most common types.

Raid 0 - striping.
Minimum requirement 2 drives.
Data is stored on each drive in turn, so large blocks of data can be recovered from multiple drives at the same time.
Advantage - performance.
Disadvantage - lose one drive and you lose ALL the data.

Raid 1 - mirroring.
Minimum requirement 2 drives, drives in pairs.
An exact copy of the data is stored on each of a pair of drives so if one drive fails a new copy can be built from the remaining drive.
Advantage - security.
Disadvantage - lose half the total drive capacity.

Raid 0+1 - striping and mirroring.
Minimum requirement 4 drives, drives in pairs.
As it suggests, the striped drives are mirrored.
Sometimes misnamed raid 10.
Advantage - performance and security.
Disadvantage - lose half the total drive capacity.

Raid 5 - striping and parity.
Minimum requirement 3 drives.
Data blocks are striped as in raid 0, with a parity block on the extra drive.
Works on the principle that A⊕B(⊕C⊕D...)=X, where A, B etc are the data and X is the parity. The ⊕ symbol means XOR. If you do not know any one of A, B (, C, D) or X you can work it out from the others because A=B(⊕C⊕D...)⊕X, B=A(⊕C⊕D...)⊕X, etc.
Calculation of the parity is done in HARDWARE (the XOR logic gate is one of the simplest gates there is) so there is no processor hit.
Each drive takes it in turn to have the parity block, so that if one drive fails the system doesn't have to do the recovery calculation for each read and the resultant performance hit until the drive can be replaced is minimal.
Advantage - performance and security.
Disadvantage - lose capacity of a single drive, potential performance loss on very large writes, but usually done in the background so not seen.


If anyone suggest that you should use anything other than the above in anything less than an extreme security environment, simply tell them to go boil their heads.

Explanation - Raid 10 - mirrored striping.
Minimum requirement 4 drives, drives in pairs, controllers in pairs.
Subtly different from raid 0+1, theoretically gives slightly better performance in some instances, but requires a controller for each side of the mirror therefore more expensive.

For the home user only RAID0 and RAID1 are really applicable and the choice between them really boils down to speed (R0) or security(R1).

Typically, I would think that security is more easily addressed through backup to disk (CD or DVD) or, given the decreasing costs, an external drive, rather than implementing a RAID1 array.

RAID0 is controversial as the risk of data loss is multiplied by the number of drives in the array and many dispute the advantages of the perceived speed gain.

Personally, I found RAID0 to be undeniably faster and the entire implementation process was an interesting learning experience.
That said, I admit I no longer use it- primarily due to noise considerations.
With R0 you always have two (at least) drives grinding away and my focus of late has been silence above all else. Hence my love of the iRAM.

This will probably change when I move to the new Intel platform (whenever than might happen) which features "Matrix RAID".
I've seen absolutely amazing results using Raptors in the matrix and would find it difficult to resist at least trying it out.

mr. nails the users that you are are running a motherboard that supports serial ATA hard drives (-HDD- *I am tired of typing harddrive). When windows starts its install, it will prompt you to load a raid driver (F6) just before set up begins. Since windows is doesn't understand raid (at this time) and if you do not load the raid driver it may have 3 different out comes:
1) windows does not detect HDD
2) windows detects HDD but see only 88 Gb and only formats the 88 gb even though your HDD 320 GB. This can be corrected through computer mangement in administator tools but instal is still screwwd up.
3) windows installs the wrong drivers and your Serial ATA (SATA)hard drive actually runs as with an IDE controller rather than a SATA controller.When this happens anything goes. Lots irq conflict issues. Sound card loads above or directly below your video card. Problem, no sound or poor graghic card performance. I have seen set ups were windows loads a raid driver after your set up to control the IDE optical drives, problem may not read or may not burn and it may not be both. (how come I get so many coasters my DVD burner is junk , take it back it under warranty, how many times have you seen that posted.) or Windows doesn't see optical drive after install, but it installed Windows from it.This was on a SIS chipset for you non believers.
During setup of Windows the only way to load the raid driver is by using a floppy. Many people do not do this and can not figure out why the pc is not functioning properly.You noticed I did not say it wouldn't run. Windows will not be able to correct any of the problems, as it created all of your problems.

If you need 4 hard drives and 2 DVD burners (optical drives).
2 HDD's would be SATA, 2 HDD's would be IDE , 1 Master and 1 Slave, your otical drives would be installed on your secondary IDE ,with 1 master and 1 slave. I know that is pretty basic but gets my point across.
Now this set up will gain you 2 additional drives that you would not have if you were not using SATA.
SATA drives will will also increase you transfer rate, but the average user will never use or take advantage of the benifit. In short they use it it for benchmarking and bragging rights.(My computer is better than yours)-bad example.

Now if you wanted your operating system(windows) on your primary SATA controller and Windows does not see it, Windows will now install on your Primary IDE controlled HDD, Not quite what you were looking for.If you continued with the setup Your SATA harddrives would have to be formatted and partitioned after you set up. Windows is now NOT set up on the drive you wanted. This may give you problems if you are trying to set up a PC with multi boot operating systems. Windows 2000, Xp, Vista. You would want you largest and fastest drive for vista , The next largest and fastest for XP. and so on. But you will start your install with Windows 2000 and it loading onto the wrong HDD all because you didn't load the raid driver.

Now I am going to throw another loop at you, as someone else posted about controllers(I wanted to stay awy from this) You can also purchace Raid controllers that plug into you IDE slots, But we are not going their right now.

Now I feel I have to clarify some points, I let Windows load drivers but I also check device manger and open everything up to make sure it actually did load the right driver. Just because there is no yellow ?, doesn't mean windows loaded the right driver. The yellow ? just means Windows doesn't know what it is.

ok, hopefully one last no0b question. how to make it work? for instance: raid 0? hook up 2 sata hdd's on mb, install raid drivers, go into bios and enable raid 0? it will say raid 0 in bios? that easy? or u have to install hdd's a certain way? i understand if i were to just buy a couple hdd's and do it myself i'd know the answer to this, but i just want to get all curiosity out of the way and just be aware of what i have to do. thank all u guys for ur support in helping me understand something as old as this technology, but i just never advanced to this. thx.

i use raid 0 for the example cuz i'm thinking of using 2 250gb hdd's in raid 0 for my os and games and then 1 500gb for storage. sounds ideal for me. almost 1TB. :( lol, maybe a 750gb for storage for my bragging rights. lol.

The way you get in to raid setup depends on the type of raid controller.

The usual steps are something like this:

Enable raid in bios (otherwise it's just a SATA or IDE controller)
Reboot
Enter the raid setup which now appears (usually a key combination like <Ctrl>+S)
Select the type of raid you want *** and tell it to go and build the raid array.

*** On some controllers you can also divide the raid into several "drives" at this point. These are the drives that the system sees, not the physical drives they are mounted on. For example, if you've got a pair of 250GB drives mirrored, the maximum capacity is 250GB but you might want that to appear as a 50GB drive and a 200GB drive. These "drives" can then be partitioned and formatted just like any other drive.

One thing to watch out for. Depending on the age of your motherboard, enabling raid can make some of your sata ports invisible. For example the Intel ICH6 controller can handle 6 drives in "Native" mode - 2 IDE and 4 SATA. But when you enable raid on the SATA drives it can only handle 2 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives. It isn't common now, but it's worth checking. If only we'd known that at work a month ago. :frusty:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mr. nails

ok, hopefully one last no0b question. how to make it work? for instance: raid 0? hook up 2 sata hdd's on mb, install raid drivers, go into bios and enable raid 0? it will say raid 0 in bios?

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No, it won't say RAID0.
Most likely it will ask if you want to "stripe" the drives (RAID0) or "mirror" them (RAID1).
If you stripe them you will also have the option of specifying the size of the stripe. You can either perform multiple test installs on the different stripe size options (options should range from 8MB to 256MB, IIRC) and then benchmark to see which size works best for you, or just randomly pick a size, say 64MB, and just go with it. Your average file size is what matters here, but the differences between stripe size performance are minimal for most users.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by clocker

If you stripe them you will also have the option of specifying the size of the stripe. You can either perform multiple test installs on the different stripe size options (options should range from 8MB to 256MB, IIRC) and then benchmark to see which size works best for you, or just randomly pick a size, say 64MB, and just go with it. Your average file size is what matters here, but the differences between stripe size performance are minimal for most users.

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w0w, that just got more complicated. i was hoping for "set to raid 0" command or something. now, u throw stripe size option my way. hum... more research.

It ain't that big a deal really.
If you have an nF4 chipset (my personal favorite as it easily outperforms the SI RAID many boards also include), you simply set it to "stripe", choose which drives you want included in the array and then leave the stripe size on "optimal" (which is the default option).

Make your life even easier by creating a custom nLite install disk and slipstream your drivers into it...this eliminates the F6 dance and is a significantly faster install (my rig takes @12 minutes-start to finish- till I'm on the desktop, ready to go).

Ok now where going to be going over mr nails head.

Do you really need raid on you pc Mr Nails?

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

Do you use your pc for Business?

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.

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.

Have him/her install everything and have you watch.

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

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 1Bullet

Ok now where going to be going over mr nails head.

Do you really need raid on you pc Mr Nails?

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

Do you use your pc for Business?

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.

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.

Have him/her install everything and have you watch.

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

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.

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I use raid configurations commercially all the time, but for home installations I'd steer well clear of it.

When everything is ok it's good, though I doubt you will often see much benefit. When it goes wrong you are in nightmare city, because you just don't have the resources to recover the situation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 1Bullet

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.

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

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by clocker

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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.