• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

raid 0 newbie questions please help.

T

tvdang7

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 8, 2005
Messages
4,301
hi i jsut purchased an identical SATA HD drive.

i already have a 160 gig hitachi in my rig and i want to do raid 0 once the 2nd one comes in.

here are a few questions

1)do i have to reinstall windows?...........: :confused:
2) can i still have partitions on the hardrives? i like having a D drive.
3) what improvements will i see?
4) any tips?
 
1 - probably should. you could likely install the raid controller, image your existing hdd and build / restore to the array but I wouldnt personally take that route. too many things that could go wrong.

2 - indeed you can :) once an array is built it is seen as one drive. you can partition and format it just like a single drive setup.

3 - depends on what you do on your comp. it will not cut game level loading in half in fact some may actually suffer a slight speed penalty. video editing (not encoding) or similar content creation that relies strictly on sequential transfer rates will see a nice performance boost.

4 - backup, backup and backup. with level 0 you loose one drive and all your data is gone. also if you go the reinstall windows route, make sure you create the driver disk for your raid controller.

 
what do u mean by driver disk? im using my motherboard. it has built in raid correct? abit an8-ultra. i dont need a seperate piece of hardware do i.

so no speed boost in gaming.......i was hoping i was going to get that. all i do is game and burn movies. will i be I/O limited if i were to rip a dvd and play a game since its like 1 drive.
 
nope, no seperate hardware required but windows setup is unaware of nvraid. you'll need to create a driver disk (1st item or from your mobo cd) then hit f6 when prompted during the first screen of the installation. it will look like nothing has happened at first but you will eventually be asked for a floppy containing drivers for unrecognised hardware. this is after you build the array in the controller bios btw.

define rip. if you mean ripping an iso of the dvd having array should help some. if you mean re-encoding with dvd shrink or a similar app probably not so much since this is a cpu dependant task. dual cpu (or core) would be the key ingredient to smoother multi-tasking in that scenario. an array will help for the copying phase but not the encoding phase.


 
thank you. i feel i do not have a need for this :confused: . i thought i was going to get a big performance increase in the game loading department and the decoding.
 
no problem, you may want to read this. kind of shatters some myths about raid 0. i would have liked to see a bit more comprehensive testing but its a decent barometer of 'average' conditions. also check out the answers sticky in this forum. there is a pretty good read on the pros and cons of raid in general.


 
tvdang7 said:
1) do i have to reinstall windows?...........: :confused:
2) can i still have partitions on the hardrives? i like having a D drive.
3) what improvements will i see?
4) any tips?
Click to expand...

I have a RAID 0 setup with 2x160gb Hitachi SATA drives...

1) Yes, if you can.
2) Yes, you can partition it like you would normally.
3) You will see a big increase in sequential reads/writes. Access time will be slightly higher.
4) Backup important data often since you double the risk of a failure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top