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harddrive puzzle

C

crazjayz

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 31, 2005
Messages
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So my system right now is running (2x250GB) x2. Essentially TWO RAID0 "virtual" drives each complied of two "physical" 250GB drives. All drives are 7200rpm and 16MB cache. I also have a 200GB PATA one lying around. Now with this info, what's the best way to setup my system? 500GB is getting a bit small for a partition (i'm already pushing 300GB of DVDs and i'm no where close to finishing up my collection). I was thinking OS on the PATA 200GB and the 4 250GBs in a RAID0 array for 980GB total.

I know i'm going to get yelled at and whatnot for making a 4 drive RAID0 array but so far my dual raid0 arrays have been wonderful, both on the NForce4 chipset and on the SI3114 chipset, so i'm pretty confident about RAID0.

Anyway, chime in guys.
 
well: I am not sure, but I think that in most cases it's nice to have a fast drive act as the host of the OS. I don't know the specs of your PATA drive, so I do not know how it'd compare to the SATA drives you have, but I am willing to guess that the SATA drives are faster.

From that perspective, I would have a SATA drive be the OS drive and probably do one of the following:
  • use Windows JBOD to span a volume across the four remaining disks
  • use the nVidia controller to spand a JBOD across the four remaining disks
  • use drive paths to map 3 of the four remaining drives onto the last one, separating my DVD collection by some category across the drives. Probably I'd use the 200 GB as the 'root' and then map each of the 250 GB to folder like "Drama", "Chick flix" and "Porn".
 
A 4th option would be to have them all as independent drives. 1 large volume can be nice, so if you really want that, I would suggest a JBOD as drizzt81 said. I prefer separate volumes simply for organazing my data. Also, I can let friends borrow a single drive if they wanted a crapload of data.
 
I'm with Vertigo. I usually slice out partitions. System I'm on now has a pair of 73GB SCSI-U160's in RAID1 split 18GB/55GB with the first 18GB for the OS. Seperate 73GBs for the storage.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
A 4th option would be to have them all as independent drives. 1 large volume can be nice, so if you really want that, I would suggest a JBOD as drizzt81 said. I prefer separate volumes simply for organazing my data. Also, I can let friends borrow a single drive if they wanted a crapload of data.
Click to expand...

I'm not in any sort of sharing mood with friends :p (if they need anything we usually transfer it through gigabit ethernet or and external hdd. The comp is a meld between a gaming comp and a fileserver. drizzt81, the specs on the PATA are 7200rpm and only 8mb cache ATA133. It may be a bit slower than the SATAs, but I don't know by how much (i'm guessing not a lot).

Secondly, how does JBOD work? I'm familiar with most RAID arrays, but I've never experimented with JBOD.
 
crazjayz said:
Secondly, how does JBOD work? I'm familiar with most RAID arrays, but I've never experimented with JBOD.
Click to expand...
JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks. It's exactly what it sounds like. Data spans the drives in the JBOD. They fill up sequentially. If you lose one drive in the array, you only lose the data on that drive. Also, it's trivial to expand the size of the array with additional disks as required.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks. It's exactly what it sounds like. Data spans the drives in the JBOD. They fill up sequentially. If you lose one drive in the array, you only lose the data on that drive. Also, it's trivial to expand the size of the array with additional disks as required.
Click to expand...

Will it require to format the HDDs that will be joined for a JBOD setup ?
 
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