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Setting up a RAID 0
tyrannus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, my old computer took a crap and mirroring two Western Digital 250gb hard drives didn't do crap to help me when the array was destroyed. So, I'm looking to maybe do a fresh install of XP on the two, now apparently clean, hard drives with a new array. The array I want would be combining both 250gb hard drives into something that offers, I guess, 500gigs of crap. I think the mode for that array is striping, but I'm not quite sure what to do. The mobo I use is an Nvidia 680i SLI board, if that helps at all.
So, can anyone give me a runthrough of what to do, really? And maybe after I set up the RAID and go to install XP?
So, can anyone give me a runthrough of what to do, really? And maybe after I set up the RAID and go to install XP?
tyrannus on
Posts
Do some research on RAID before you jump into it.
When booting up the Windows install disc, you will see the blue setup screen and some text at bottom of screen. When it says "Push F6 to specify alternate SCSI/HDD controller" hit F6 (the exact text may be a little different than that, just hit F6 when it says to at the bottom of screen). You will then need to insert a floppy disc with your RAID controller drivers (as Windows XP setup disc may not have drivers for your RAID controller, and therefore will not be able to "see" the array). Select the RAID controller you have from the selection read off your floppy disc. Install Windows XP as you normally would from there on out.
That all said, it's kinda a pain, and striping 2 discs in RAID 0 will give you little performance benefit (you start seeing that at around 3-4 disc arrays) and NO parity (no fault tolerance, if one disc dies your array is gone). If you want to stripe with parity, you need RAID 5 (3 disc minimum).
What happened to your RAID 1 mirror? It whould have worked for you (unless both drives failed simultaneously, or perhaps a virus wrote to both discs simultaneously hosing your system?).
Also - raid1/5 helps if you lose a drive, not if you blow up the array.
Raid 1 = Everything is written to both drives at the same time (hence "mirror"). If you get corruption in a file, well now you have multiple copies of a corrupted file. Don't confuse the disk redundancy with data integrity.
I have a SATA RAID 5 array across 4 x 320GB drives on my ASUS P5B deluxe. I know its completely unnecessary, but I love it. and it's cheaper than buying two 500MB drives, which is the whole point of RAID anyway (hint: the I in RAID stands for inexpensive)
Callum - Sniper (Lethality), Brax - Commando (Healing), Xintoch - Assassin (Tank)
Actually, it depends entirely on what you read / who you talk to. It's stood for inexpensive and/or independent.
Basically, if you are using the same board you did before, pop the new drives in, start booting, and when prompted by the mobo, push the function key listed to start the config utility. Then when you go to create an array, choose striping instead.
I don't believe it - I'm on my THIRD PS3, and my FIRST XBOX360. What the heck?
And if something went wrong with your past array, why would the so-called "risky" array fare better?
raid0 works best when you have a lot of small files and need high seek speeds, as you're essentially using the speed of 2 drives -- each drive only has to seek and read half of each file. But that speed is useless unless, you know, you actually have a use for it. Most people don't. And if you DO have a use for it, you should have an automated backup system that mirrors the entire raid0 array to a backup each night (or every week or whatever), not simultaneously.
Feel free to play with it, but make sure you're comfortable with it and have a good backup system before you commit anything of importance to it. Most people lose data not because of a one-time, easy to diagnose problem, but because through laziness they neglect to back things up when things start going bad.
I've run Raid 0, I've run JBOD(Just a bunch of disks, an alternative to RAID 0 that just basically connects the 2 HDD's together without the risks of raid 0), and been burned by both. I've been running just having the 2 drives for a couple years now, and while I've killed my OS in that time, I've never lost any important data because it sat on the second drive that is not needed for the OS.
That said, play it safe if you have anything you don't want to lose.
Summed up nicely. I plan on running RAID-0 in my next build, but I also plan on having an entirely separate system still running for backups of anything remotely important, along with DVD backups of anything I'd really miss.