RAID5 = 1 logical volume?

There are other ways:
Linux: Software RAID or spanning
Windows: Spanning with dynamic disks
 
What he said. It'll work, certainly, and there are other ways to do the same thing.
 
What are you trying to accomplish? The RAID or just making multiple drives appear as one? If its the latter, windows will let you mount drives as paths instead of giving them drive letters. This is how linux does it too. When you are creating your partition it will ask you is you want to assign it a letter or mount in an empty folder. Basically you can call your second drive /Data. It will appear on Drive C under data. There will not be another drive listed in My Computer.

It's not anything like RAID at all, just a way of making two drives 'appear' like you only have one.
 
I'd be careful mounting windows drives to a path rather than as drive letters. I ran my system that way for a year and a half before I completely switched to linux, since it made more sense to me. It was definitely more trouble that it was worth. I ran into lots of problems. For some reason, file permissions didn't work. On the disk that was mounted under Documents and Settings, I couldn't delete anything until I added a drive letter. I could write files, read them, and edit them on the desktop or under My Documents, but to delete them I had to go through Z:. Same files, same drive, different behavior depending on how I was looking at them. I also ran into problems with older programs. They couldn't follow the mount points, so they'd write to the C: drive and cause the volume that was mounted at that point to unmount. I was excited about that functionality at first, but was frustrated when it didn't work well. You're much better off using separate drive letters in my experience. Of course, spanning should work fine, but I never tried it. The best thing to do would be a real RAID controller.
 
I ran it for over 3 years this way with none of those problems. I'm sure most people don't have the same severe problems you describe, or it would have been addressed by MS by now. Are you sure you didn't propagate any strange security settings to the folder?
 
Steve01S4 said:
I'd be careful mounting windows drives to a path rather than as drive letters. I ran my system that way for a year and a half before I completely switched to linux, since it made more sense to me. It was definitely more trouble that it was worth. I ran into lots of problems. For some reason, file permissions didn't work. On the disk that was mounted under Documents and Settings, I couldn't delete anything until I added a drive letter. I could write files, read them, and edit them on the desktop or under My Documents, but to delete them I had to go through Z:. Same files, same drive, different behavior depending on how I was looking at them. I also ran into problems with older programs. They couldn't follow the mount points, so they'd write to the C: drive and cause the volume that was mounted at that point to unmount. I was excited about that functionality at first, but was frustrated when it didn't work well. You're much better off using separate drive letters in my experience. Of course, spanning should work fine, but I never tried it. The best thing to do would be a real RAID controller.
Click to expand...

I ran into that same issue with Windows XP Pro and never could figure out why. I switched to linux as well b/c of this too. I truly wish MS would get its head right and do thigns like symlinks etc.... would make life so much easier.

But as to raid on a box... software raid via windows worked well for me (as a drive) but I much prefer linux.
 
trmentry said:
I ran into that same issue with Windows XP Pro and never could figure out why. I switched to linux as well b/c of this too. I truly wish MS would get its head right and do thigns like symlinks etc.... would make life so much easier.

But as to raid on a box... software raid via windows worked well for me (as a drive) but I much prefer linux.
Click to expand...
Thread derail for the win:
(hard?) links for NTFS
 
phr0ze said:
I ran it for over 3 years this way with none of those problems. I'm sure most people don't have the same severe problems you describe, or it would have been addressed by MS by now. Are you sure you didn't propagate any strange security settings to the folder?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure. I'm more of a *nix guy than a Windows guy, so it's possible I missed something. If I'd done some strage security things though, I assume they would have shown up whether I accessed the files through c:\Documents and Settings\Steve\Desktop (or whatever the exact path was) or z:\Desktop. I know enough to know that I didn't change any security settings though. As far as the issue being addressed by now, you must have more faith in MS than I do. :p

To get back to the OP's question, if you're going to span more than one drive (through RAID or JBOD or whatever), I'd get a controller. I don't trust onboard stuff after a friend lost an nForce RAID 5... luckily it could be recovered. I'm still deciding whether I trust any software raid, but I haven't heard much good about the Windows one, and from my understanding, XP doesn't support it without a registry hack. I can only speak for myself, but I value my data enough to not trust it to software RAID that I had to cheat the OS into running. If I'm wrong about the quality of Windows' software raid, please let me know, but I'd like more information than just "it worked for me".
 
hmm...thanks for the replies. I am thinking of setting up either a win2003 server or a ubuntu server - which would be better for setting up something like JBOD?
 
Well, if you run Ubuntu, you could do Linux software RAID 5. I don't think Windows 2003 does that. Most Windows servers run hardware RAID.
 
protias said:
I don't think Windows 2003 does that. Most Windows servers run hardware RAID.
Click to expand...
Win2K3 supports dynamic disk based (i.e. software) RAID-0/1/5. I do not know about its performance.

If you are going to set up JBOD, I would strongly encourage you to research what happens with either system if a drive in that array fails. Do you lose the whole array or just the data on that drive?
 
If you are talking a new motherboard, cause all you can do on that AN8 is JOBD.


I recently did a raid 5 on my new rig, here is how easy it was.

Intel ICH8R in the P965 chipset.

downloaded the windows pre-install drivers from my board manuf.

Booted and hit Ctrl+I to get into raid bios setup and told it to make a raid 5 out of the 4 installed disks.

oh, yea, its all one logical drive. There probally is some windows limit but I didnt hit it, and while the ICH8R supports 6 sata disks there is a limit of 4 physical disks in a raid 5, apparently they did that to force people wanting bigger arrays onto the server chipsets. Other 2 ports usable, just cant use in the 5 array.


Rebooted to Windows install CD.

Hit F6 when prompted, feed it the floppy.

Watched TV while it formatted the array, install runs.

finish installing windows.

Reboot

Install all drivers including Intel Marix Storage Manager

Reboot additional computer setup tasks.

bleh, a caveman could do it, RAID 5 see my sig.

On several overclocking adventures I have corrupted it several times. I guess not too awfully bad as on reboot I get a notiifcation in windows that it is verifying and correcting the array, so for next 20 min I try not to screw it up again till it finishes.

Really slick, just carefully read your motherboards instructions and be ready to hit F6 it comes early and goes away fast.
 
hmm - i thought i could do RAID5 on my an8-32x. oh well, i guess I can just do JBOD since its all going to be just media anyways.
 
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