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Windows on a striping RAID, good idea?

Locust76Locust76 Registered User regular
edited February 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
I'm waiting on a new mobo/CPU/RAM to come in the mail and I'm currently trying to figure out how I'm going to install Windows on it.

Right now, after having a shitty RAID controller (Nvidia 590 sli) on the old motherboard that killed my RAID every now and again for no damn good reason, I'm a bit leery. I WANT to install Windows (Vista Ultimate 64 bit) on a two-disk striping raid for better performance, but I'm afraid that if I fart too close to my computer it's going to fuck up and I'll be spending all my free time reinstalling the damned OS.

My other four drives I want to put into

a) another striping RAID for my games (becoming drive D)
b) a mirroring RAID for my data (becoming drive E)

The new board is an Intel P35-based board (Asus P5K3 Premium) with an Intel ICH9 RAID controller.

Will I regret having installed my OS on a RAID with this thing? Is the ICH9 as error-prone as the Nvidia RAID controllers?

Locust76 on

Posts

  • FeralFeral ＭＥＭＥＴＩＣＨＡＲＩＺＡＲＤ interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Do you have 3 separate disks of the same capacity?

    Striped RAID is... meh... but if you can devote 3 disks to the OS you can do RAID-5 which is the best of both worlds. There's really no reason to do RAID-0 if you can do RAID-5.

    Feral on
    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • DeusfauxDeusfaux Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I did RAID0 on Nforce 4 AMD chipset, then ICH7R, now on ICH9R. There might have been some minor issues on the Nforce 4, but you couldnt tell I'm on a striped set on this Intel chipset. (apart from the performance benefits here and there)

    Deusfaux on
  • Locust76Locust76 Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Feral wrote: »
    Do you have 3 separate disks of the same capacity?

    Striped RAID is... meh... but if you can devote 3 disks to the OS you can do RAID-5 which is the best of both worlds. There's really no reason to do RAID-0 if you can do RAID-5.


    Unfortunately I do not have 3 disks of the same capacity. I'd like to, but it's just not in the budget right now :P

    So, it seems that from Deusfaux's post that I probably won't have problems. Anyone else have any positive/negative experiences on this particular controller?

    Locust76 on
  • DeusfauxDeusfaux Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I'll mention I do backups to a 3rd internal drive with Synctoy 2.0, and to a 4th external drive with the included Autobackup 2.5 software.

    I should press a few backup dvds too

    Deusfaux on
  • subediisubedii Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I have to say that I deliberately stay away from RAID striping. The added risk of losing all my data isn't really worth it to me for a minor bump in speed.

    I much prefer to keep personal data and things on one drive, with the OS / program files on the other. Makes it simple in the event that the OS goes belly up and I have to re-format / re-install to that drive.

    Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep backups of your data regardless and all, but I've just never really trusted RAID 0, it seems like an additional risk for not much benefit.

    subedii on
  • Locust76Locust76 Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Subedii I totally agree with you. I have two internal mirrored 400gb drives that carry all my important info such as music, docs and photos, as well as a third external 400gb that's a copy of the mirror. Losing important data isn't my problem, I just don't want to have to reinstall my OS and apps because the RAID dies every week like my Nvidia RAIDs used to.

    Locust76 on
  • 3lwap03lwap0 Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Ideally, if your raid controller supports it, try and configure an ideal raid to have your boot partition mirrored, with your data partition configured into a raid 5, and keep a hot swap spare on standby for your raid 5.

    Striping isn't worth the performance bump.

    If that's just not practical, I suggest a Raid 0+1. It'll take four disks, but you get the best of both worlds, performance and fault tolerance.

    3lwap0 on
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