RAID Setup & OS Q's

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

Just purchased 2x 500gb seagate hard drives, and was planning on assembling them in RAID 0.

I also have a 320GB drive and a 200GB drive, was wondering if its possible to have the 2 new 500GB drives in a raid 0 setup to improve performance, and somehow use 1 of the other drives as a backup in case one of the 500gb drives bites the dust? or would I need a total of 4 identical drives for that?

I have an ASUS M3A motherboard, it supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1


Also, I was thinking of installing Vista Ultimate... Do I need a floppy drive for the raid drivers or can I burn a CD-R with the drivers on it?

Currently running Win XP pro x64 on an AMD 6000 x64 processor with 4gb of ram... Finding drivers was really tough, and I have alot of compatability issues with stuff. is Vista Ultimate any better? or should I look at a different OS?

Thanks in advanced and sorry if the questions are noobish, been a few years since I messed with this stuff and all the hardware has change quite a bit over the years.

a single 200gb drive I bought cost $200 1-2 years ago.. but the 2 new 500gb drives I just got cost me $150 shipped for both.. talk about depreciation...

 

[Prometheus]

Well, for RAID you need identical HDs. You can't shove the lower storage drives into the raid config plus you don't have RAID 5 available to you.
My first idea would be to get a similar mobo that supports RAID 5 and get another 500 gig, RAID 5 works with 3 drives plus and can stand the failure of one HD.
As for installing the RAID drivers themselves, I'm not completely sure. I would have a floppy drive ready in case of the need for it but a thumb drive or CD may work.
:thup:

 

[Rapmaster]

Vista setup lets you install RAID drivers from floppy, CD ROM or USB flash memory keys. There's a good chance it will already have the drivers built in anyway- at least enough to get you through setup and then you can upgrade them the normal way.

 

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

Thanks!

I do not have a floppy drive, which is why I was asking if I would really need it. Chances are I would never use it again after windows setup anyway.

I'll give the flash drive or CD-ROM a try; and as far as the RAID 5 I'll probably just wait a bit and see how it runs with just 2 drives in RAID 0. Anything of importance I can just put on one of my other drive for now.

If 1 drive dies I won't be terribly upset anyway.

 

[Prometheus]

Just wondering, which drives did you get?

 

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

Seagate ST3500320AS

500GB 7200.11 32MB cache SATAII

 

[Prometheus]

Ah, I got the same one.
Great HD. :thup:

 

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

Argh, ok now trying to set this up and got some issues.

going for performance (not os much gaming but alot of large file xfers and dvd conversion stuff)

so, im thinking 64k striping instead of 128k, disable "Gigabyte Boundary", and disable "Fast Init".

If I have the 2 drives on SATA CON 1 and 3 on the motherboard, and go into the raid setup I want to have both drives setup as raid 0 in LD-1 right? so one drive will be 1-1 and the other 1-2.

Now, I changed my mind about vista and went with XP pro x64. Only problem being, I don't have a floppy drive and you need to have one to get xp to install... so I used N-Lite and am trying to incorporate the raid drivers into windows install, but need to know which drivers to use.

I created a virtual floppy drive, and using the asus utility created a RAID driver disk. I have 4 dirvers files to pick from.

x86 I386
x86 AMD64
x64 I386
x64 AMD 64

so.. due to the fact this is a x64 installation i want probably the amd64 x64 driver right? and are my settings good in terms of performance for large data xfer?

 

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

solved my problem!

while using N-Lite the drivers HAVE to be text and not PNP, otherwise they will not load during the windows setup process... made alot of CD coasters before learning that, hopefully it will help someone else in the same situation

 

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

Well.. one of my drives crapped out today

came home and my computer was running CHKDSK with a crapload of bad sectors, tried to recover it but its toast.

So... RAID 0 kinda sucks cause there is no way to recover data. Didnt notice a huge Difference in performance with raid 0 anyway... so if I get another 2 500gb drives is it possible to set them up in such a way that 1 of the drives is a backup / parity and the 3rd one is an addition striping drive ?

 

[SerraAvenger]

Well, for RAID you need identical HDs. You can't shove the lower storage drives into the raid config plus you don't have RAID 5 available to you.
My first idea would be to get a similar mobo that supports RAID 5 and get another 500 gig, RAID 5 works with 3 drives plus and can stand the failure of one HD.
As for installing the RAID drivers themselves, I'm not completely sure. I would have a floppy drive ready in case of the need for it but a thumb drive or CD may work.
:thup:

6 Drives. Not 3.
For 2 HDs I recommend mirroring. I have a few friends how used RAID 0 and lost all their sensitive data becouse one of them HDs broke. Unless you have some online / dvd backup service, don't do it.

EDIT: Now that I read the last 3 posts: sigh. I knew it would happen -_-

For 4 Disks, use RAID 10. Get a Mainboard that supports it. If you can't, use the 0+1 RAID your Motherboard supports.
If you just have 3 disks, use RAID 0+1. I'ld recommend R10 though.

Best wishes, Davey

 

[Prometheus]

6 Drives. Not 3.

RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.

 

[SerraAvenger]

RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.

Oops, I misread RAID 05. Sorry, then.

 

[Exfiltrate]

If you get two more identical drives your can use raid 10 (1+0) Which will use raid 0 for speed and raid 1 for data redundancy. This would be a good option, although if you don't need that much space I would just do raid 1.