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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2000 12:43 am Post subject:

What is the best way to setup an IDE RAID system?

Philip C. Hewitt II
aka Rover
Editor/Writer/Reviewer
LittleWhiteDog.com
- Tellin' it like it is!

Stray Dog Joined: 24 Oct 2000 Posts: 8 Location: USA

I don't have a real answer, but do think it sounds like a tempting idea. It seems like you could increase your speed considerably (Raid 0), without increasing your failure probability by much. Two 20 - 30 G HDs wouldn't cost much more than 1 40-60, but would be faster. What current MBs or Disk controllers support Raid? And what levels do they support, just 0 and 1 or can any do 0+1? Maybe answering that would help to answer what the best way to implement it.

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2000 12:15 pm Post subject:

I guess RAID 0+1 would be good, but what would the advantages be? Besides speed of course, what would be the benifit of adding RAID 1 to RAID 0?

Rover
"...She went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone,
when she bent over Rover took over and gave her a bone of her own!"

Big Dog Joined: 20 Oct 2000 Posts: 3689 Location: USA

one advantage would be a few seconds off the load time when you fired up UT

you'd probably slide up a few marks in your madonion scores across the board too because of the increased disk speed

you'd encounter fewer "drmatic pauses" under win2k once your pagefile was on Raid

There is NO spoon !
-Brain

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2000 10:49 am Post subject:

"dramatic pauses"...what do you mean by that?

Rover
"...She went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone,
when she bent over Rover took over and gave her a bone of her own!"

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2000 2:50 pm Post subject:

I think the easiest and cheapest way to set up an IDE RAID array is: Hook yourself up with an ultra cheap Promise Ultra 66 or 100 card. Use the hack listed at numerous sites(www.tomshardware.com has it) to hack the card into a Fastrak RAID controller. Get two IDE drives of the same size and speed. Set them up as a striping array.

A lot of folks claim this can be bad because now you are dependant on two drives instead of one. If one of them fails, you lose all data off of both. How many of us have hard a critical hard drive failure? If you back up semi-frequently I don't think this is much of a concern, unless your on a mission critical machine, in which case you should get four identical drives and set up a striping-mirroring array. My two coppers.

"Environment is everything - The Lion may be king of the jungle, but you airlift him to Antarctica and he is just some Penguin's Bitch" - Dennis Miller

Butt Sniffer Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 1883

Adaptec has released an IDE RAID card that supports RAID 5. Also if you are building a new system a couple mobo manufacturers have integrated the Promise RAID controller onto the mobo

Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2000 6:15 pm Post subject:

Leave it to Adaptec to lead the pack with IDE RAID5. That's what I've been waiting for!!!!! YEEEEHAAAA

Rover
"...She went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone,
when she bent over Rover took over and gave her a bone of her own!"