More Raid 0 Questions

[personapazzesca 0]

Good day all,

As you can see this is my first post. I have a 1.8GHz with 512 RDRam and a 40 GB h/d on WinXP(home).

 

I want to do some DV editing and DVD authoring. I've read that for video production it is better to have two drives in a RAID 0 config than to have a single large h/d.

 

I want to purchase two western digital 120GB IDE h/d and set them up as a secondary h/d in a RAID 0 config. However, I really don't know how to accomplish this task. Any help is appreciated.

 

I've read that WinXP has a disk management utility to setup a RAID. But I've also read that there are hardware controllers for this application too. Should I use software or hardware?

 

 

[jmmijo 1]

To clarify some things that APK posted, Windows XP Home does not include any RAID functionality, I do believe is one of the differences between it and the Pro version. XP Pro does indeed support software RAID 0 and JBOD/SPANNING. For video editing this is not recommended.

 

I would suggest the following configuration for XP Home:

 

The Promise FastTrak S150 TX2

 

and (2)Two WD or Seagate 120GB SATA drives. Remember now that Seagate offers a 5 year warranty across the board, desktop and enterprise HD's

[ScinteX 0]

Hi,

Thought id add just a bit of additional info should anyone be looking at this and thinking that they might like raid 0 too!

I found the easiest way of getting fast disks at a reasonable price is to buy a motherboard with support for sata raid.

 

This comes usually in the form of a chip from intel, highpoint or promise... as Alec said.

 

Its then as simple as connecting the drives up and running the software on the chip itself.

 

My setup below was dead easy.

 

Got 2 western digital drives (the smaller 36Gb Raptor), connected them to the sata connectors

Booted up the PC and pressed CTRL-I which took me into the software to setup the array (intel ich5)

Configured it (its kinda obvious when u r doing it)

Rebooted with the XP CD in the drive and bob's your aunty it works- XP merrily installing on the array.

 

Of course you have to load up the raid driver during the setup (press f6 when the message is shown at the bottom right at the start of installation)

 

Now i have (just ran these tests without any kind of special setup, and i have been using my pc all day):

About 187Mb per sec (burst)

Around 105Mb per Sec sequential read

...at a response time of 8.8ms.

 

Only puts on 2% CPU load.

 

I think this performance is well worth it- for example if you run just one SATA or PATA drive you will see around 60Mb per sec sequential read. So sata raid0 is not that far off double the speed. Ultra ATA looks like its just down on SATA150.

 

Anyhow that should give you some idea on the stats.

 

If you want some realistic measures... my PC boots into XP Pro in about 14 seconds from when i press the on button. At least 3 or 4 seconds of that has to be POST! And it isnt just down to my RAM and CPU, this type of setup is quick.

 

Have fun guys

 

 

 

[ScinteX 0]

oops missed one issue! Just read your 1st post on this subject:

 

Its true that the ICH5 chip makes the two disks appear as one however its dead easy to partition it. I use Acronis Partition Expert which chops the disks up quite nicely indeed.

 

I did wonder how it did this so i did some testing and it appears that the new partition was spead evenly over the 2 physical disks. Ive had no issues with this at all and it functions just like any normal single disked machine.... i forget about the RAID most the time.

 

----

Scin

[personapazzesca 0]

Wow, thanks for the information. I appreciate everyone taking the time to reply.

 

It will take me some time to process all the information. There are some abbreviations I don't know, i.e. iiRC.

 

I don't think I'll buy a new mother board. That sounds expensive. How do I know which type of mother board is in my PC?

 

I think the control card is the way to go for me.

 

Can I keep my 40GB h/d as my main system drive and configure two 120s in RAID 0 as a slave drive?

 

So far every time I read about someone setting up a RAID 0 drive, it is being used as the only drive.

[jmmijo 1]

Originally posted by personapazzesca:

Quote:

Can I keep my 40GB h/d as my main system drive and configure two 120s in RAID 0 as a slave drive?

 

So far every time I read about someone setting up a RAID 0 drive, it is being used as the only drive.

 

Sure can, just make sure that you don't partition the RAID array with any ACTIVE partitions as these are the only bootable kind Just configure the RAID array as a primary partition or an extended partition, it should work either way under the Disk Management control panel applet.

 

@APK, only the Raptor's have the extended 5 year warranty period. This is because WD based the design on their older Enterprise class 10K SCSI mechanism's

 

There standard desktop drives are still only a one year warranty and their SE drives are 3 years.

 

Seagate basically said, hey, we're so sure of our quality that *all* of our drives manufactured since a certain date are now warranteed for 5 years, regardless of wether or not they are enterprise class or consumer class drives

[AndyFair 0]

Originally posted by personapazzesca:

Quote:

...Can I keep my 40GB h/d as my main system drive and configure two 120s in RAID 0 as a slave drive?

 

This is the preferable way of doing RAID0, as it means that if the RAID array fails, at least you won't lose your OS. RAID0 is not, strictly speaking, RAID as it offers no redundancy - if one of the drives in the array dies, the whole array dies, and there is no (easy) way to recover your data.

 

If your finances stretch far enough, I would investigate a single 120Gb drive as slave to the master OS to store your files on, and get 2 x 36Gb drives for the RAID0 array, which are only used as scratch disks for the video editing. That way if the array dies, at least you're not going to lose your important files.

 

Just my tuppence worth of advice, for what it's worth.

 

Rgds

AndyF