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Raid0 help

T

tdiddy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2005
Messages
191
So I just got another 120gb Sata Maxtor diamondmax 9 hdd to add to my Hitachi Sata 160 and my WD Pata 120. Being as I'm fairly new to raid setups, I wanted to know if I could run the new Maxtor and WD in a raid0 array even though they are different makes and different interfaces. Thanks in advance.
 
I believe nvraid (nforce board) will span controllers. Otherwise you pretty much have to go software raid.

edit: just noticed your board. according to this, it will span controllers. "NVIDIA RAID allows RAID arrays spanning across Serial ATA and Parallel ATA"
 
I thought that's what that meant, but wasn't quite sure. And there shouldn't be any problem with the different makes of hdd's?
 
There shouldn't be. Just make sure you have a backup strategy in place, ... just in case :)
 
tdiddy said:
Kewl, also what programs do I need to set it up?
Click to expand...
You have to reinstall windows inorder to set upNvidia RAID. The existing disk format (that has windows on it) has to be changed to a RAID array. Then windows will install on this new configurationl.
This assumes RAID(0). Before you jump into RAID, I think a little more reading would save you alotta trouble. It's not as simple as installing a game.
 
Yeah I've been doing some reading and isn't seeming as easy as I thought it was going to be. But I thought it was going to be something like when you load windows, which I knew I was going to have to do again anyway, and it asks if you want to install raid drivers to press F6 to install them. Is there more to it than that? Or where is the best, or easiest to follow, hardware raid 0 guide?
 
Other than the drivers, you should not need any special programs. I haven't used nvraid but it should be similar to most other raid setups. Enter the controller setup screen after your machine posts, then create the array. You should see every drive in the system and be able to add it. Just use caution not to add your 160!

You may want to check this out. It is written with a clean install in mind, but it does show the array creation process. I'm guessing you will want to install the nvraid controller in windows before creating the array assuming you want to add rather than boot from it.

edit: So you cannot use nvraid to add an array to an existing system without formatting?(!)
 
I thought it was going to be that easy/difficult, I just needed the guide to walk me through, which is perfect thank you. I'm going to do a fresh install on these discs so there shouldn't be too much trouble in intalling a copy of windows. Oh, and I'm not touching the 160gb as that will be my backup. Thanks again.
 
You will likely be underwhelmed by the performance of a level 0 array especially if your box is mostly used for gaming. Great for cumulative capacity and large sequential transfers, at the expense of reliability. Also in some cases there is actually a performance hit running a level 0 raid. Might want to look at the [H] raid faq in the "answers" sticky because as billb mentioned, there is much to consider.
 
What dirtydr is trying to say is:
Don't come crying to us when it breaks and your data goes bye-bye.

Not only are you mixing drive manufactuers, but possibly drive geometries, areal densities and then PATA and SATA.

Good luck with that.
 
drizzt81 said:
Not only are you mixing drive manufactuers, but possibly drive geometries, areal densities and then PATA and SATA.
Click to expand...

The controller issue isn't as big as you think. Current drives aren't comming close to saturating the PATA bandwidth much less SATA'S bandwidth. His setup is technically no worse than using two SCSI RAID cards with an array build from drives on each card. There's still two control ASICs involved and the entire array performs at the speed of the slowest ASIC/drive. Basically the array will perform like a PATA drive array, not that there is that much of a difference bewteen the two anyways.

The drive geometry is a different story. It's not a good idea to mix and match drives but most newer RAID ASICs will determine the highest common geometry for each drive from it's native settings. I can't speak for nVidia's RAID design but my Highpoint R2220 did just this when I had an array of 2 160GB with a 250GB. Instead of 320GB of usable space (RAID 5) I had 316GB as that was the data size that all three drives could support without remapping the drive geometry.
 
From my understanding you won't gain any noticable performance from raiding 2 compleatly different drive.

Now i have WD 80 gig PATA drives that were mixed newer and older versions, but from my understanding the drives were basicaly identical internaly. I did not have a problem, but the box on these drives were identical, just some were newer than others and the jumpers worked a little differently.

If you going with 2 compleatly different drive I think raid-0 will only hurt ya. it jsut will not work well for performance plus you are at a huge risk of losing your data.

Think about it all your drives will spin up at different speeds and take different amoutns of time to access data, not only are they different brands but they are also all different sizes, so you will lose alot of storage space. in Raid-0 you want all the drives to act identical, to reduce seek times and keep reads contigious. This is Definately NOT a good idea.

don't do it.
 
I'm not going to put all my drives into raid just my 2 120gb. And I know there will be a slight difference in the speeds of the drives but overall they should be about the same and should give me a performance boost. I do game, but I also do some video encoding along with some audio encoding. I'm pretty sure I'll get a boost for my video but I was also wondering if it would affect my games at all. And I do realize what raid 0 means for back up purposes.

Is the general consensus that I shouldn't do it? Should I just get two identical drives to do it with? And then try again? Or is the performance difference bewtween identical and mismatched negligible and I can just run on what I have?
 
A level 0 array will not help your a/v encoding since that is a cpu bound process. When you hear the blanket statement that raid is 'good for video' that is only applicable to playback (editing) or capture. Similar to the "Macs are better for graphics" blanket statement it is, at best, a half truth. If you are pumping multiple streams into your editing app it will give a good boost in performance. Not too many years ago you had to have a SCSI array if you expected anything resembling realtime playback of uncompressed SD video. That is no longer the case, a new single sata drive will get the job done.

Content creation and scratch disk is another area where a level 0 array will show good speed boosts. Photoshop is a dog when working with print quality images (300+dpi). High resolution textures and scenes being loaded into your favorite modeling/animation package would benefit from it also. Both of those instances rely on large files. Some games will show a loading performance boost while others will actually load slower.

Setting performance aside, if you want to combine two smaller disks into one large drive you have no choice other than jbod or level 0. No getting around that. There is indeed a higher risk of a total loss due to a failed drive or a controller glitch. Also the array you create will only live on that controller. It cannot be transplanted into another machine intact. You will need to backup the data (which you should already be doing) and recreate the array in the next system.

Some people are very strong supporters of raid 0 for every situation and others are almost violently opposed to it for any situation. I'm more inclined towards assess your usage, learn the pros and cons and determine if what you do would benefit from it. From what you have mentioned, I would lean towards it not complementing your usage unless you need to combine those drives, do editing of your video as opposed to backing up dvd's or want to increase the size of your e-nis(TM) ;) Or if you just want to learn about setting up an array. Nothing like hands on learning but realize that 2 disks does not equal twice as fast no matter what a synthetic benchmark says, but it does equal more than two times the risk which no benchmark Im aware of will calculate.
 
I agree with the majority above.

RAID is a cool thing to try, but not to seriously use in the case of "mix and match", especially with PATA and SATA. It will probably work for a couple months, then crash hard.
 
The_Mage18 said:
The controller issue isn't as big as you think. Current drives aren't comming close to saturating the PATA bandwidth much less SATA'S bandwidth. His setup is technically no worse than using two SCSI RAID cards with an array build from drives on each card. There's still two control ASICs involved and the entire array performs at the speed of the slowest ASIC/drive. Basically the array will perform like a PATA drive array, not that there is that much of a difference bewteen the two anyways.

The drive geometry is a different story. It's not a good idea to mix and match drives but most newer RAID ASICs will determine the highest common geometry for each drive from it's native settings. I can't speak for nVidia's RAID design but my Highpoint R2220 did just this when I had an array of 2 160GB with a 250GB. Instead of 320GB of usable space (RAID 5) I had 316GB as that was the data size that all three drives could support without remapping the drive geometry.
Click to expand...

My point is not that it is 'impossible' to do, but that it makes the system more complex, thereby increasing the chance of failure. simple as that.
 
drizzt81 said:
My point is not that it is 'impossible' to do, but that it makes the system more complex, thereby increasing the chance of failure. simple as that.
Click to expand...

And my point was the tone of your post made it sound like it was doomed from the get-go.
He's adding about the same risk as if he was putting another stick of RAM in his system. Though personally I wouldn't choose RAOD 0 unless you were doing a lot of video capturing and would move the swap file to that drive.
 
The_Mage18 said:
He's adding about the same risk as if he was putting another stick of RAM in his system.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't go that far. Now if you were using 3 different brands of memory, at 3 different rated speeds, and 3 different sizes, that would be more of an issue. Otherwise, a 3 disk RAID 0 with 3 different drives with different drive geometry offers much more of a risk of failure.
 
Rocco123 said:
I wouldn't go that far. Now if you were using 3 different brands of memory, at 3 different rated speeds, and 3 different sizes, that would be more of an issue. Otherwise, a 3 disk RAID 0 with 3 different drives with different drive geometry offers much more of a risk of failure.
Click to expand...


He's not doing 3 disks, he's only doing the two 120GB.
tdiddy said:
Oh, and I'm not touching the 160gb as that will be my backup. Thanks again.
Click to expand...
tdiddy said:
I'm not going to put all my drives into raid just my 2 120gb.
Click to expand...

tdiddy:
Will it work? Yes.
Is it easy? Yes and no, easy to create the array and a little more work to install Windows on that array.
Will it be stable? You're using RAID 0 which is not a stable method to store data, backup anything that's important often and don't be suprised if you have to reload everything because a drive failed or the array crashed.
Will there be a speed/performance boost? Probably not. RAID 0 only really benefits video capturing from medium to high resolution streams and large file read/writes such as those from CAD and/or image manipulation apps that use hard drive space to cache operations rather than RAM. If you don't do either of these, RAID 0 won't be of any real use to you. Even with gaming RAID 0 does not offer any real benefit.
 
Okay thanks again guys. I don't think I will end up doing raid at all in the near future. I was thinking it wasn't going to work as well as two exact drives but that's why I was asking everybody that knew more about raid than I. Many thanks again, and maybe there's raid for me yet.
 
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