Understanding RAID 0/1

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Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 7, 2003
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My motherboard comes RAID 0/1

Here it is.
http://tinyurl.com/yc4n66

From my VERY BASIC understanding what raids do it accolates the amount of drive space and either mirrors it or combines it to work as 1. Either way you get faster performace.

So my question(s):

Is this over simplifying it?
What is better to go with using these harddrives: http://tinyurl.com/u5rmw
What is the different between using whats on my MOBO compared to a Controller?

thanks as always guys.
 
RAID 0: Striping, Splits files into small stripes, stores the stripes on each seperate drive in the the array. Big performance gain, slightly higher latency no redundancy, higher risk of data loss (if you lose any one disk in the array, all the data is lost).

RAID 1: Mirroring, mirrors one drives content onto the other on the fly. No performance increase, redundant, much lower risk of losing data due to drive failure.

I love using RAID 0, now that I'm on a single drive again I can really feel the loss in performance. My motherboard has two controllers, one on the chipset, and another built on but over PCI. The integrated chipset controller (ICH5R in my case) is faster than the PCI controller. But it uses more CPU power.
 
what exactly does 0+1 do? my GUESS is 4 drives, raid 0 plus mirrored for redundancy incase of failure?

RAID 5 is 3 or more drives, with 1 hotswap incase a single drive fails or something right?
 
0mega said:
what exactly does 0+1 do? my GUESS is 4 drives, raid 0 plus mirrored for redundancy incase of failure?

RAID 5 is 3 or more drives, with 1 hotswap incase a single drive fails or something right?
Click to expand...

Yes, RAID 0+1 is a mirroed set of striped drives. RAID 5 is a striped set with distributed parity. You can also include a hotspare with RAID 5 because the drive can be rebuild with the parity data.
 
Lets say I do a Raid 0 for performance but later wish to do some more for redundency, will I need to start all over or add on to it?

Also how big of a performance boost is it really? is it like drastic?

Finally where can I find info on how to set one up properly?
 
If you're just doing typical home PC type crap, or even gaming, you probably won't notice a difference. If you're working with huge files then you will notice a difference.

My single drive performance with HDTach was like 55mb/s, RAID 0 was around 105mb/s
 
If you are new to it, and don't have a HUGE need for it, RAID is a complete and utter waste of time. It's complicated to set up for no reason, the manuals you get are no help, tech support generally doesn't know what they're doing either, most motherboards have multiple raid controllers as well as multiple firmware apps for configuring, etc etc etc. Last time I did a RAID 0 to try and console myself for no longer having a 10k rpm hard drive, and I was utterly disappointed. No noticable speed boost to Windows install, nothing. When I upgraded to a 10k hard drive, I noticed how fast that went. Anyway, if you want to have a carbon-copy backup, then RAID 1 is a good idea. However, it's probably not much more money to just get an external hard drive with a 1-button backup feature. I've been building systems since I was 13-14, and I gotta say, RAID is my least favorite thing to do.
 
For the most part I will be do gaming but I will be doing some production work for photoshop and stuff like ableton live and reason for music creation so I'm sue there is a benefit. as far as an external with a 1 button solution doesn't really seem viable to be being that they can be nearly 2x the price that just an internal harddrive. I If anything I may just try it and see how it works if I'm not satisfied then don't bother using a raid and keep my 2nd 250g as a backup differently partitioned drive. this is definately a interesting endevor I'm embarking by what I see people adding on. Thanks guys.
 
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