Storage Can a Raid0 storage drive co-exist with an OS drive?

I'm planning on getting another identical Samsung F3 1TB drive as I'm running out of storage space for movies, games etc. And being completely new to the concept of raiding up 2 hard drives, can it co-exist fine without a problem along with my Intel SSD which has the OS on it?

The Intel and Samsungs will be connected to 3 of the 4 Intel SATA ports on my motherboard.

Also, I should set this raid0 up as a hardware raid via the BIOS (or RAID manager if there is one), and as 128k stripe? What else should I expect to happen, i.e. will Windows 7 require a driver or anything before the raid is usable?

I've had a look through my mobo manual, and found that I can set up raid by going into the BIOS and changing it to RAID (other choices being IDE and AHCI). Currently it's on AHCI and changing it to RAID would disable AHCI and my OS drive (on the SSD), which is not what I want I think. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks

p.s. I sync my storage drive with an external drive via usb2 every month, so data loss is the least of my worries.

 

Why RAID it when it's only for storage? It's a needless risk.

 

Because I don't want to spend £120 on a 2TB western digital caviar black. The samsung 1tb is only £40, its a no-brainer. Plus the speed boost would be welcome for my installed Steam games.

 

With RAID0 you effectively double the risk of losing all your data as 1 drive dies and you lose the lot. If you're running Windows 7 then just install the disk as another drive then add it to your Libraries. This will give you seamless access to the files/folders within the Libraries, the only thing to remember is that when saving you have to select the Library to save into else it defaults to the users default Library.

I've got 2 1.5tb drives and a 500gb (drives D:, E: and F drive setup as above for storage of films and music.

Also, when adding drives I always go for get the largest you can afford approach, if the drive is simply for storage and play back of films and music then even a green drive will suffice.

 

RAID0 for storage is crazy talk.
I know you said you have an external backup, but is it big enough to cover the 2TB volume?

 

Forgot to answer your original question, yes it can co-exist but what mode are you running your SATA ports in right now? Reason I ask is that if you're running them in IDE or compatible mode then you'll need to do a registry hack/frig before changing them in the BIOS else your comp will just blue screen or restart before it loads Windows.

 

yes, at least for the important stuff, I don't care much if I lose a month's worth of games I've installed, can always download it again from Steam.

I'm running it in AHCI mode

 

I think you still need to do a registry hack.

 

Ok, so I'd loose AHCI functionality for my boot Intel SSD if I wanted to RAID up my 2 Samsung HDDs?

 

IIRC, no, it would bluescreen on boot - a registry hack is (iirc) necessary. Change your pc to raid mode and try to boot up (without going in the raid bios).

If I were you I'd save time and make a Windows software RAID0 (or perhaps a spanned partition?) in the drive manager. It would save a fair bit of time, and the end result would be identical in usage.

 

Running windows 7?

Plug your drive in as normal, then in the disk management extend the volume of your storage drive into that new drive. It'll virtualise a JBOD volume over both disks. Works perfectly fine.

If your current storage disk is a "basic disk" though, be careful because changing it to dynamic *might* require formatting it and starting again, which is obviously bad. I can't remember though - the prompts will tell you.

If you make any sort of RAID volume both drives HAVE to be formatted. Plus, they both have to spin up to get the data = more time as the BIOS always does one at a time (I know, I run virtualised RAID 1). With JBOD it'll just ask the single drive to wake and pull off the data.

 

Converting from basic to dynamic doesn't need a reformat and any data on the disk will be fine.

Other than that Bindi's advise to make a spanned volume across both disks is spot on. Better than a RAID 0 because of the drive spin up thing and the non destructive setup but still has the same risk of 1 drive failure taking out the whole volume.

 

No - 1 drive failure takes out half of the volume ie half of your files are completely recoverable, no questions asked.

 

That is not how RAID0 works, i don't think.

 

It's not how RAID 0 works. It stripes the data equally between the two drives, which is why you get double the write speed - overhead. If you're putting a 2 GB uncompressed video onto a RAID 0 setup, half of the video will be on one drive, half on the other.

It's nearly impossible to recover any of the data if a RAID 0 array fails.

 

This description is correct. Files are not written alternately on drives, but "stripes". Stripes of data is concurrently written/read to both drives at a hardware level. Windows sits atop this hardware level, so if one of the drives fails, half the data goes south for winter, and without any parity bytes to calculate what the missing data is, is lost for good.

Is there much of a benefit to running ACHI? I've not enabled it on mine, and I run my main OS over 2 SSD's in raid 0.

 

Thanks for the replies, I will have to give this some re-thinking on an alternative as I don't want to disable AHCI for my SSD, nor do I want a software raid as I want to double up the data and speed.

The 2TB caviar black is too expensive, and the cheaper green models seem too slow in sequential for loading up games.

Well, I don't know what changing the SATA mode in the BIOS to "RAID" will do to my SSD, because the SSD isn't going to be RAID'ed at all.

 

Sorry I just realised ASUS renames its SATA 6Gbps as "Drive Xpert" and "Super Speed" means RAID 0 - so don't use that, just use "normal".

 

I think they are refering to JBOD and not RAID 0

 

Well no - he was talking about spanned volumes, or to use a nice little acronym JBOD (just a bunch of disks).