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Raid 0 + 1 migration from single drive?

S

spotpuff

Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2001
Messages
522
I'm looking for a way to keep large amounts of data on my PC without having to worry about hard drive crashes... when you have 2 IBM 60GXP's crash on you within 2 weeks of each other and they were in RAID 0 you get paranoid.

Anyways, right now I'm running a Single 200GB Seagate drive, I was looking at either

1. Buying just another drive. This doesn't help with data redundancy of things like movies, music, pictures, etc. but hey it's more storage.

2. 4 320GB WD drives in RAID 0+1 for redundancy. Theoretically 2 drives can fail and the data isn't lost. Do I need the RAID edition drives if I'm using the NF4 controller for RAID 0 + 1? I have a DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ulra-D

3. Raid 5, which requires more drives and a $500 controller card. Not even looking at this solution until the price comes down.

So basically I'm looking at #2, so I can keep movies etc. on my hard drives without having to worry about burning them to CDs or whatever since that is a pretty huge pain. That and CDs do seem to break down after a few years.

My question is basically how would I go about moving my data from the single drive to the RAID 0 + 1 array? Could I:

1. Install 2 disks in RAID 0
2. Use xxcopy to clone the contents of my drive to the new disks
3. Re-assign the new drives as "C" in windows without making it blow up
4. Remove old 200 GB drive
5. Install 2 more drives and convert array to RAID 0 + 1 without losing data

?

If that process isn't viable, is there one that will work, perhaps using Norton Ghost? Also, can the raid 0 array be converted to raid 0 + 1 on the NF 4 controller without formatting/losing data?

Also from a future-proofing perspective, can extra drives (in pairs) be added to a raid 0 + 1 array without losing data on the existing array? Or does the entire array have to be formatted? As you add more drives the efficiency of the array starts to become more of an issue cost-wise; 50% storage capacity sucks vs (n-1) that raid 5 offers. Right now the NF4 board only supports 4 drives, but in the future if I were to move to another machine entirely, I wouldn't have to reformat the drives if I were still using raid 0 + 1 would I?

One last edit: for the on-board NF4 raid 0 + 1, would it be recommended to get WD's "raid edition" drives with TLER, or is that only required for separate (pci/e/x) controllers? It's not really clear from WD's documentation.

Thanks.
 
I think you might be confused about what 0 + 1 is. If you lose one of the drives in a 0 +1, you lose one of the mirrored sets and it's no longer redundant. I think you are mistaking that capability with RAID 5. RAID 0 +1 was meant for the performance boost of RAID 0, with the mirror of RAID 1. Keep in mind that if you have 4x320s in RAID 0+1, you will only have ~600ish GBs of volume space.

RAID 6 however can recover from a two-disk failure, and is one of the only RAID levels that can do this. However you do lose two disks worth of space for parity.

Honestly, if you plan to fork out the cash for 4 320s, get a RAID 5 card. Good ones can be had for the 300-400 range, like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816131003 . Also a plus is that you only have to have 3 drives in RAID 5.

Reassigning C to another drive isn't as easy as it looks, as is changing your array from a 0 to a 0 + 1, this depends on your controller, but in most onboard RAID controllers this is not an option. For the card mentioned above, you might be able to mirror a striped set without issues.

Bottom Line: RAID 0+1 is still redunant, but you lose lots of space. Take the money from the 4th HD, and put it towards a nice controller and make a 3 disk RAID 5.
 
Rocco123 said:
Bottom Line: RAID 0+1 is still redunant, but you lose lots of space. Take the money from the 4th HD, and put it towards a nice controller and make a 3 disk RAID 5.
Click to expand...

Agreed, this is the route I would take as well. It does not take a $500 controller card to get into a raid 5 array. You could step into a controller like this for about half that.
 
I know if you lose 2 drives you can either lose all your data or only the mirror depending on which drive it is, but isn't it possible to lose up to half the array without losing yoru data?


e.g. if you lose the "1" part of the array and thus just the mirror you still have an entire stripe intact. Or lose disk a from one stripe and disk b in the other stripe.

Unfortunately, there's a few things hidnering me from buying raid 5.

1. Cost. 320 GB HDD is $160. Raid 5 cards are way more. (Canadian funds).
2. No PCI-E Raid 5 controllers, at least not anywhere in Canada that is easy to buy from

I agree though if there was a PCI-E Raid 5 controller I would be all over it.

*edit* actually ,there's some raid 5 controllers out there that are pretty cheap, but they do not have "hardware" raid 5 IIRC. I thought software RAID 5 was one of the most awful things in existence, but I could be wrong.

*edit2* How easy is it to move a RAID 5 array to a new controller? Do you lose all your data?

Also no one answered the question about the RAID edition WD's w/ TLER vs plain disks.
 
Highpoint 2320, raid 5, cheap, software raid but plenty fast, tweakers review link, have class, later.

 
unhappy_mage said:
Highpoint 2320, raid 5, cheap, software raid but plenty fast, tweakers review link, have class, later.
Click to expand...

Well, from the review at http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/highpoint-rocketraid-2320_16.html

However, RAID5 arrays still leave much to be desired. I dare conclude that HighPoint software developers should pay a little bit more attention to this array type.
Click to expand...

So, it still seems like their software raid is very weak. ALso xbit didn't test CPU utilization during any of these tests. If sequential write CPU utilization is 100% as with the other Highpoint RAID 5 PCI card reviewed at Lost Circuits, I don't think I want to get the card.
 
spotpuff said:
So, it still seems like their software raid is very weak. ALso xbit didn't test CPU utilization during any of these tests. If sequential write CPU utilization is 100% as with the other Highpoint RAID 5 PCI card reviewed at Lost Circuits, I don't think I want to get the card.
Click to expand...
The 2320's little brother's little brother, the 1820a, does among the best in terms of CPU usage / MB/s in tweakers' review - 1.85% per 100 MB/s writing. The xbitlabs review doesn't measure desktop performance, which is most indicative of what a file server with one or two simultaneous users behaves like. And for media files and the like, 10 MB/s is plenty. There's no need for performance in mass storage of this type. But hey, it does pretty dang well on the STR tests - almost 200 MB/s with 4 disks, almost 350 with 8 - and that's close to what large file transfers are like in an ideal case.

 
If these cards are all software raid (no dedicated IO processor for XOR calcs) then what is the cause of the huge disparity between CPU usages?

Is it poor drivers on highpoint's part?

Thank you for the review link, though, mage.
 
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