As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/

Goin' RAID

zilozilo Registered User regular
This may be a thread for H/A, but here goes. So I picked up a second hard drive on the cheap, and an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate through the employee purchase plan at work. How do I go about setting up RAID 1 and upgrading to Vista at the same time? Is it as simple as upgrading to Vista, duplicating my single disk, and plugging both into my onboard RAID controller? I'd really love to avoid having to start from a fresh partition since I imagine I'd have to copy all my files off, reformat, install XP, upgrade to Vista, and copy/reinstall everything.

Anyone have any opinions as to RAID 1 vs RAID 0 performance-wise? Redundancy would be nice but not if the performance hit is huge.

zilo on

Posts

  • DehumanizedDehumanized Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    RAID 0 is high-performance, at the expense of disk longevity. Data is spanned/striped across the disks in the set. There is no redundancy, and if either of the disks in your set fail then you've lost data. However, as far as RAID configurations go, this offers the best possible pure performance.

    RAID 1 gives no particular performance benefits (well, to be more specific writes will be slower and reads will be faster), but provides the best possible data redundancy. The second drive in the set is created as a mirrored backup of the first, so both your drives have to fail in the same place for data to be lost.

    I'm pretty sure you'll need to work on new partitions regardless of the RAID setup you go to, though I haven't done it myself.

    Dehumanized on
  • DaedalusDaedalus Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    RAID 5 is the best but requires at least three disks and a good RAID controller. You get improved performance and redundancy at the same time.

    Basically, the performance benefits for a home user with RAID 0 are close to nil. For random reads along the disk (typical pattern for most home uses), the seek time is what's going to kill you, and RAID can't do anything to fix that. The benefits of RAID 1, on the other hand, are obvious and it's probably the route I'll take for my next non-laptop computer.

    Daedalus on
  • zilozilo Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Yeah, I didn't figure RAID 0 would be worth it and was planning on doing RAID 1 from the getgo.

    So I'm going to have to repartition my drives, huh? What an incredible pain in the ass.

    zilo on
  • ecco the dolphinecco the dolphin Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Yeah, unless you do some form of magic with the drivers, you'll need to set up your RAID1 array *prior* to installing an OS on the RAID. This is because once you're set up with RAID, your hard drives won't be shown to Windows as hard drives anymore. For example, my RAID1 array is listed in the Device Manager under Disk Drives as an "LSILOGIC Logical Volume SCSI Disk Device", as opposed to two independent hard drives.

    So if you've installed an OS, and then created the mirror, what will happen is that the OS will try to boot up, try and find the hard drive it was installed on and fail because the (e.g.) 160gb drive that you had is no longer visible as a Seagate 160gb drive - it's now part of a new RAID drive under a different name.

    Personally, I run RAID1 arrays because I've had hard drives crash and have lost important pieces of data/photos/personal files. If someone had gone to me when I had just lost the data and said, "Hey, for $80, I'll get all those bits of data back for you", you better believe me that I would've paid them that much. I figure for RAID1, I'm just paying in advance.

    ecco the dolphin on
    Penny Arcade Developers at PADev.net.
Sign In or Register to comment.