RAID question

[nobody_here]

Setup is now a single 320Gb WD Blue AAKS SATA 16MB cache drive as primary OS with WIn 7 x64 installed

also have a 250Gb Seagate Momentus used a back up drive (using Win 7 backup feature)

then an 80Gb old IDE hard drive.....

so what i do now is anything i want to keep i drop on the 80Gb drive, then i have the 250Gb drive set to backup the 80Gb drive contents only so i have some redundancy

i am building a new system from the ground up in a few days just waiting on parts to come in

ordered a 320GB WD BLue AAKS drive to match the one i have now

want to RAID 0 the 320's for performance reasons, but it would be nice if i didn't have to format and start over from scratch, but if hardware RAID set up before OS install is the best performance option then i will

but then what should i do with the 250Gb drive and 80Gb drive? i am going to put the 250Gb drive in a 2.5" eSATA enclosure i have because my new mobo has an eSATA port on the back, so that external drive will become the new backup drive

guessing i should just retire the old 80Gb HDD and let the 250 backup the important parts of my main 640GB OS partition.....or should i partition it off? does RAID affect that?

first time going RAID, wondering what you would do

 

[Dangman]

Your plan for the 250GB drive sounds fine. Ditch the 80GB drive. It's old and probably near failure if you keep using it.

As for the RAID 0 array and how to get the OS on it, are your hard drives installed with AHCI enabled in the BIOS already?

 

[nobody_here]

Your plan for the 250GB drive sounds fine. Ditch the 80GB drive. It's old and probably near failure if you keep using it.

As for the RAID 0 array and how to get the OS on it, are your hard drives installed with AHCI enabled in the BIOS already?

hrm...not sure how to check, let me reboot and look

 

[nobody_here]

i cant find any mention of AHCI in the BIOS

only during post it lists the drives and says S>M>A>R>T is enabled

it's an EVGA NF41 socket 939 mobo

 

[Dangman]

It should be under some setting called "SATA" mode.

In any case, you're better off just doing a fresh install considering the motherboard you have.

In fact, you were actually better off just buying a single drive rather than do a RAID 0 setup considering that the older Nvidia storage controllers had relatively slow RAID speeds.

 

[nobody_here]

crap.....ok......i did that a couple months ago because i wasn't anticipating upgrading at that time.....oh well

 

[Dangman]

It happens.

 

[nobody_here]

thanks for the advice on the new system hardware by the way

everything was telling me the Core i5 and i7's were the only way to go right now......but i had stopped following the AMD Phenom situation after the initial release of the original Phenom which tanked hard and was frying itself if you tried to overclock at all......

while the i7 is still top dawg, i found that this quad core Phenom II 955BE with some overclocking love should be as fast as any i7 system and for a lot less $$$$

 

[Dangman]

Ahh glad to hear that you enjoy your new AMD system

Yeah the Phenom II 955 BE is a really good value.

 

[nobody_here]

So what does anybody have to say about cluster size (128k, or 64k) and what about partioning the raid 0 array? I dont know about short stroking them a lot, but some would be ok if there was noticeable real world performance. Say if I ended up with combined 320GB it better show me huge gains. What about partitioning? Can you partition it after windows is installed like any normal drive in win 7 x64?

 

[Dangman]

So what does anybody have to say about cluster size (128k, or 64k) and what about partioning the raid 0 array? I dont know about short stroking them a lot, but some would be ok if there was noticeable real world performance.

Not as big as a performance difference nowdays

What about partitioning? Can you partition it after windows is installed like any normal drive in win 7 x64?

Yes

 

[nobody_here]

ok guys, one last time, i know i am asking multiple questions here, going to be building this thing tomorrow evening

Raid 0 will be used but.....

64k or 128k stripe?

use full drives, 320x2 = 640Gb standard Raid 0 setup one partition?

partition a 35Gb +/- partition first to install windows on, partition the remaining 605Gb as one large second partition? (is this not the same as short stroking but i actually get to use the entire drive?

or

short stroke, set up 120x2 = 240Gb but nearly double IOPS and 5ms (from 15 to 10ms so 33% increase) faster random access times (according to HD Tune around 100-120 GB is where the drive performance on my drive starts to go down)

what happens to the rest of the drives? are the other 400Gb's completely useless, as in cannot be seen?

maybe i dont understand this short stroke thing, but it sounds like all you do is set up the RAID partition size smaller than what it would be by default, thus using the outside most part of the platters and thus limiting head travel and increasing performance?

 

[Dangman]

Not sure about the RAID stripe size.

The other 400GB is completely useless. You got the gist of short-stroking.

If you want every single ounce of performance possible from the hard drives, short-stroke. If you want some storage, do regular 640GB partition.

 

[nobody_here]

but can i do two RAID 0 partition? one 35Gb partition for OS and the rest as a secondary partition? im confused as to why people dont do that when "short stroking" anyways instead of leaving all that space to waste....sure the performance on that partition might not be as good, but just having the OS on that one outside partition seems like a good boost

 

[Dangman]

but can i do two RAID 0 partition? one 35Gb partition for OS and the rest as a secondary partition? im confused as to why people dont do that when "short stroking" anyways instead of leaving all that space to waste....sure the performance on that partition might not be as good, but just having the OS on that one outside partition seems like a good boost

Yes. People actually do what you're saying. In fact, I did it myself with my own drive. However, supposedly leaving all that space to waste actually improves performance. Dunno the validity of that statement but it shows up from time to time.

 

[nobody_here]

ok, im just going to do a single 640Gb RAID 0 config and be done with it, looks like not enough real world performance to warrant it, if i can only see it in synthetic benchmarks im not interested