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Windows Software RAID5: Is adding additional drives possible?

O

offdigital2

n00b
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
Messages
12
I'm thinking about using Windows dynamic disks to create a RAID 5 array, but I can't find information anywhere about whether or not I would be able to add extra disks later on. Does anyone know if it's possible?

TIA
 
Negative. You can only expand simple, spanned, and mirrored volumes to include additional disks. Also, Software RAID-5 is going to put a serious load on your system because the parity data must be computed by the CPU, which means it has to read the data off the drive twice and written once to complete a write cycle. The writes will be unbearably slow, especially if you plan on using consumer/desktop drives for such a project. Also, the read performance will not be that much better than single drive. Software RAID-5 should only be considered when fault tolerance is an absolute must and the 50% overhead of RAID-1 is unaccpetable because of capacity requirements being above physical system integration limitations. (ie, you can't get enough drives in the case/on your controller to meet your capacity goal with the high overhead of RAID-1) BTW, I'm guessing you already know this, but for everyone else's benefit, software RAID-1 and RAID-5 are only available on 2K Server or Server 2K3 (not on XP Pro)
 
DougLite said:
Negative. You can only expand simple, spanned, and mirrored volumes to include additional disks. Also, Software RAID-5 is going to put a serious load on your system because the parity data must be computed by the CPU, which means it has to read the data off the drive twice and written once to complete a write cycle. The writes will be unbearably slow, especially if you plan on using consumer/desktop drives for such a project. Also, the read performance will not be that much better than single drive. Software RAID-5 should only be considered when fault tolerance is an absolute must and the 50% overhead of RAID-1 is unaccpetable because of capacity requirements being above physical system integration limitations. (ie, you can't get enough drives in the case/on your controller to meet your capacity goal with the high overhead of RAID-1) BTW, I'm guessing you already know this, but for everyone else's benefit, software RAID-1 and RAID-5 are only available on 2K Server or Server 2K3 (not on XP Pro)
Click to expand...

Bummer. Would a 3ware card let me expand an array? Or does everyone on this forum just imagine they'll be building new arrays in future, rather than adding drives?
 
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