Raid 0 Suxxx

[ricochet]

I had two 80 GB. Western D. Hard drives in RAID 0 running for 4 months. I had downloaded about 5 or 6 DVDRs to burn to disk this weekend. My new 50 pack of DVDR disks were due Friday from ups. On Friday afternoon my wife ( when i was at work) went to get on.
She said she got a error that a file could not be found ( for startup) and that it needed the windows disk to repair it. She tried to repair it and the repair failed.

When I got home, thinking I was going to watch a new recorded DVD, Then go to the Bar. She told me about this. After some looking into it I found that 1 of my hard drives failed. I could not even reformat the drives. I have now bought a 60 GB. Maxtor (master) and a 160 GB. Maxtor (slave) drive.

No more RAID 0 for me... Running this way I see no difference in speed...

I understand that in RAID 0 the data gets wrote to both disks at the same time.

Is there any way to recover data from a reformatted disk that ran in RAID 0 ???

Would that data be usable ??? or complete ???

[lynx]

Raid 0 is striping. Data blocks are written alternately to one disk then the other, so neither disk has a complete set of data. It is supposedly the fastest raid implementation, but on an IDE system with both drives sharing the same bus it is unlikely to be much faster than treating it as 2 separate drives, with the downside that if you lose one drive you lose the contents of both.

So I'm afraid the answer is no, it has all gone.

[SingaBoiy]

Whats the difference between Raid 0 and Raid 1?

[clocker]

Raid0, as lynx said, stripes the data across two drives.
Windows sees the drives as one big drive.
If one drive fails it takes out the whole shebang.

RAID 1 mirrors data...the second drive is a copy of the first, so if one drive fails the system carries on using the second drive...no data has been lost.

[Virtualbody1234]

Yup. I have to agree with ricochet. Quite a while ago I had a setup with raid 0 using onboard Highpoint RAID controller. The motherboard failed (don't know why). After that I found out that I couldn't access my data anymore eventhough the drives were perfectly fine. The only way would have been for me to puchase the same motherboard again. There was no way I was going to do that. It failed so I didn't want the same product again (Abit). Also the newer boards were available with more advanced features for less money. So the data went bye bye.

[SingaBoiy]

You coulda bought it, transfered the data, then took it back.

[clocker]

Oddly enough, the machine I'm using to post is my first experience withe RAID0.

Yesterday I completed the initial build of my brother's second server.
As he is out of the country for a few weeks I was free to install XP on it and play around for a while.
Like the first machine, this too has twin 74GB Raptors and I was interested to see how the striped array "felt" during my normal usage.

So far, not terribly different than my WD IDE drive.
Boot time is fast, but I don't have a lot of programs loaded, so the comparison is invalid.
At any rate, it's certainly not the blazingly fast revelation that some would have you believe.

My next move is to wipe the array and build a mirrored set ( RAID1).
Mostly, I'm interested in how Windows will "see" the disks in Disk Management.

His old server ( Server 2000 with SCSI disks) showed TWO C:drives and monitored their health.
My first server ( Server 2003 with SATA disks) showed but ONE drive.
Microsoft says that currently Server 2003 does not deal with SATA well and perhaps a patch will be made available.
We are interested in seeing if XP will display both drives under RAID 1.

From a business's standpoint it is NOT acceptable to be unable to verify that BOTH disks in the array are in good shape.
We have no doubt that the mirroring is taking place, but the inability to tell if one of the drives has failed severely comprimises the whole security issue that RAID 1 is supposed to afford.

This blind spot for SATA drives seems an odd oversight on MS's part...surely many small businesses are using SATA as a replacement for the more expensive SCSI alternative and increasing number of consumer grade motherboards have SATA RAID incorporated on-board.

[Virtualbody1234]

Originally posted by SingaBoiy@8 August 2004 - 11:37
You coulda bought it, transfered the data, then took it back.

That's not my style.

[SingaBoiy]

Originally posted by Virtualbody1234+8 August 2004 - 13:39--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Virtualbody1234 @ 8 August 2004 - 13:39)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-SingaBoiy@8 August 2004 - 11:37
You coulda bought it, transfered the data, then took it back.

That&#39;s not my style. [/b][/quote]

[lynx]

@Clocker, If Disk Management sees 2 C: drives then the raid is implemented with software, not hardware. With a hardware raid controller the physical number of drives is masked to the outside world, it is usual that only one drive is visible, although this can vary depending on configuration.

To give an example, you may have 4 drives in a raid configuration. These can be configured as a single drive array (visible only to the raid controller), and that array can then be split into a number of visible drives as seen by the rest of the system, in a similar way that a single drive can be partitioned. Obviously, if this is done at a software level rather than hardware then the OS must see all the physical drives, which is what you described.

Even with hardware raid, there are ways to see the status of individual drives, but this is subject to the hardware manufacturer supplying software for this purpose. As with all hardware specific drivers it is not Microsoft&#39;s responsibility to provide these solutions, although they often do when the hardware is sufficiently popular. That is not likely to be the case for SATA raid solutions, at least in the short term.