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Need Halp Setting Up a Raid

LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
edited October 2009 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
Just upgraded to Windows7 and I've given new though to setting up a raid. My mobo has a built in raid controller and I've had 2 300gb SATA HD's sitting in the PC just begging to be raided together. I formatted the 2nd recently and enabled the raid controller in the bios, then set the HDs up as a raid, but it won't boot past 'Verifying DMI data' or whatever. I'm assuming I need to setup the raid before I install windows?

I've heard its doable with windows Disk Management utility but I haven't figured out how, any help would be appreciated.

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Leonius on

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    InfidelInfidel Heretic Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    You need to create the RAID in the BIOS or device startup stages (in other words, before you get to a Windows loading screen typically) depending on your raid controller. Most have a stage where it will show some info about the controller and have a "press CTRL-I to configure" or CTRL-A or etc. Do that, if you're in the right place you'll be able to see options to make a striped volume (RAID 0) out of the two drives.

    Creating a new RAID volume is a destructive process, you need your data stored on alternate disks if you want to keep hold of it.

    I'm assuming you are interested in performance and not hardware redundancy, aka RAID 0. If you do this right, you'll still have the 600gb capacity and it will show up as one large drive when you boot the Win7 install.

    Sorry if it's not clear/exact but this varies a bit. If you have the rarer form where you set it up in the BIOS, well, you're just going to have to poke around in it because I can't say exactly where to look.

    Infidel on
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    LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    Actually I was leaning towards the Raid 1, as it gives me the same speed and the ability to keep my data should one drive fail, correct?

    I rarely use upwards of 100GB so I don't really foresee that as a problem. I guess I'll back up the 30gb of files I'd like to keep tonight. Tomorrow morning I'll enable hardware raid - then do a fresh install. I was just hoping I could be lazy about it I guess :/

    I'll post success/failure then.

    Leonius on
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    travathiantravathian Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    Begging to be set up as a RAID? Really? Why is that? If you're hoping to do RAID 0 and get some sort of performance increase, you might want to do more thorough research, because its not going to help. If you're doing RAID 1 as a means of having a backup, RAID is not a backup.

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    InfidelInfidel Heretic Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    RAID 0 and RAID 1 both give a performance increase.

    RAID 1 prevents against a failing hard drive causing your system/data to go down, correct. Not accidently deletes, corruption, etc.

    Infidel on
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    LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    I'm not exactly worried about accidental deletes, I'm avoiding Raid 0 because it doubles my chances of failure (two drives, if either fails the whole thing eats dirt). As for performance gains, I'm hoping it speeds up my load times in WoW both on startup and when porting into cities like Dalaran. And if one drive eats it, I'll be able to recover from it.

    Leonius on
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    LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    Fuck I am bad at this. Turned on raid controller in bios, set up the raid, then threw in my win7 DVD and it still showed both drives. I faaaaaaaaaaail.

    Leonius on
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    InfidelInfidel Heretic Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    If you didn't do any steps that involved choosing the RAID type (mirrored, striped, etc.) and choosing the two drives as a volume, you didn't actually create the volume, just enabled RAID.

    Infidel on
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    LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    Actually I did, popped up the raid manager after changing the board setting and set up a mirrored array with both disks. Funny thing is after the reboot I popped back in and selected repair and it seems to be working ok. Can't confirm because it's telling me my activation key is wrong and won't let me progress past it.

    Edit: issue resolved. Didn't install on a raid though. Back to the drawing board.

    Leonius on
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    travathiantravathian Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    Leonius wrote: »
    As for performance gains, I'm hoping it speeds up my load times in WoW both on startup and when porting into cities like Dalaran. And if one drive eats it, I'll be able to recover from it.

    Highly unlikely. You're better off just getting something like a WD Black drive instead. Consumer level onboard RAID is typically crap and the performance gains to be had via RAID 1 are negligible. Two crappy older drives in RAID 1 are still going to be slow compared to a newer high performance drive.

    Also keep in mind that if your mb dies, all your data is toast unless you can find a replacement board with the same controller. This is why you should just leave it as two separate disks and then do the RAID within the OS.

    travathian on
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    LeoniusLeonius Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    WEEEEEEEEELLLLLLL....how do I do it within the OS then? I'm fed up with my raid controller's incompetence (and my own) anyway.

    Leonius on
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    stigweardstigweard Registered User regular
    edited October 2009
    XP software raid 1 was for the server version only. Windows 7 does support it from what I understand, but you will be losing whatever minimal performance you would have gained through using the motherboard's hardware controller.

    Once you have windows 7 installed, go to the computer management console and convert the disks to dynamic. You should then be able to mirror them.

    stigweard on
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