NT/Win2K Software RAID

[Ron_Jeremy 0]

How reliable is the software RAID available to NT & Win2K users? I'd like to stripe a few of my SCSI drives & put the swapfile & my programs on them. This is not a server, but a home pc that will get rebooted with some regularity (this is what concerns me). Am I asking for trouble?

[clutch 1]

If you don't need it, avoid it. It has a good deal more overhead (even when compared to NT 4 software RAID) than hardware RAID or normal disk mounting, and will actually validate the disks in case of a "dirty" shutdown (45 min to an hour in my case). I used to stripe 3 4.3GB IDE drives in NT 4 Server with no issues, but when I went to Win2K server, disk I/O was miserable using software RAID. I just decided to use the disks independently until I could get a larger hard drive.

[Atreyu 0]

I'm not extremely familiar with how this worked in NT4, but I do know that once you commit to the change in Windows 2000 (you upgrade the disks from basic to dynamic) you can't go back without losing everything. Also, as clutch said, it would be better to throw them on a SCSI RAID card and stripe them that way, since in that scenario the card does all the processing. You may also want to consider this: which level of RAID do you want? If you stripe your disks, that may improve speed (with a RAID controller in particular), but if one of them fails, you lose everything spread accross the others. If you decide this sux, then you need RAID with parity, which has it's advantages and disadvantages as well. This is known as RAID level 5 and is probably the most widely used form of RAID out there.

 

There are other levels of RAID which use parity, I think they are 4 and 3.. however 5 is the best as it nearly eliminates the write bottleneck in RAID Level 4 (level 4 uses one disk for parity and level 5 uses all the disks in the array and spreads out the parity bit). This result in reads substantially outperforming writes. Raid 5, however, is often used in multiper processor environments.. which you may or may not apply to you.

 

blablabla bored at work

[Brian Frank 0]

On the other hand, RAID 0,1, & 5 are the most widely used forms. Other flavors are there, but just not used as much. RAID 5 is probably your best bet for speed and security. However, since SCSI RAID is generally targeted at servers, you could be forking over a large wad of cash if you want more than RAID 0 and 1 capabilities. I looked at price watch, and you are looking at some big bucks, sir.

 

I'm not discouraging hardware RAID at all, but if you're concerned about getting extra speed and reliability it's going to be expensive.

If it was IDE RAID, it would still cost a few hundred bucks for a good hardware RAID card, but you wouldn't be looking at over $1000 for your wants.

Considering this is a home system, I'd really advise you to skip it all together. Software RAID isn't your best bet for striping, and hardware RAID for SCSI is probably more than you'd want to spend.

If you do find a SCSI RAID card for a reasonable price, and by that I mean below $500, go for it, especially if it's new.

 

That's my view on it. I'm not a SCSI or RAID expert, but SCSI RAID is one phrase that is not described as 'cheap', at least from my quick look over at Pricewatch.

[Four and Twenty 0]

well software raid just sucks

IDE raid is the sh1t cuase it is cheap as dirt and fast as hell

SCSI riad is as b frank mentioned probly out of the question do to price

i have been using IDE raid for a while now an i love it. it is super fast.