I bought a WD 120gig sata drive on ebay for a good price but it was only one. And if I cant find another good priced WD could I buy a segate and use it in a raid 0 setup? this will be raided using the raid controller on a asus a7n8x deluxe. thanks.
to be honest i would advise against RADI0 even with identical drives the advantages for desktop computers are minimal and you run the risk of 1 drive dying and all of the data from both drives being lost, run them seperately and it would be better
Yeah, I agree a lot... unless you do backups regularly. I have two wd 40gig in a raid 0 config. takes while to build the raid array every boot, but worth it in the long run. I also know that these two drives will last me at least another two years. As far as running two different drives in a raid 0... it will be ok, here are what will happen. my setup is as follows Pri mast - array 0 - raid 0 - wd 40 gig 5400rpm 2meg cache sec mas - array 0 - raid 0 - wd 40 gig 7200rpm 2meg cache works out to be 80 gigs.. 74.something useable. the 5400 rpm drive on its own gets about 25-30Mb/s. and the 7200rpm drive on its own gets about 35-40Mb/s. in the radi config I get about 58Mb/s. Now, lets pretend that the 5400 rpm 40 gig was a 30 gig 5400rpm w/2meg cache. We would only be able to use 30 gigs on both drives because of the way raid 0 works. so a total space of about 60 gigs is possible. Also note seek times are supposed to be increased for some reason. And for me raid 0 is ok since I back up my my documents folder regularly, and I only have re-installable applications on it. the rest of y stuff I put on my Seagate 120gig sata... I am considering getting another 120 sata drive and doing a raid 0 but I just don't need the space on that drive... although I have used over 105 gigs of space so far... ( I have ripped movies cause I too lazy to go upstairs and steal the dvds out of my parents room, therefore allowing me to watch a movie at a lan party if I wante to ). hope this helps.
you have to remember that the sole performance measure of a hard drive is not transfer rate very few programs show much of a performance increase from RAID0, as the increased trasfer rate is not that big of a deal and the longer access times weigh it out RAID0 will give you better figures in benchmarks but dont expect so see much of a real-world performance gain from it, unless you are running a database server or making a hollywood film i still fail to see why so many people are so crazy about striping (striping is the correct name for it as the R in RAID stands for redundant, and "RAID0" does not give redundancy) fast access times are king when it comes to running a PC
I agree... but putting some more thought into what I need server wise, I think I will be taking out those two 40s and putting them in a software raid 1 config in a red-hat 9 p4 1.5. I do notice a fairly noticeable performance increase with the drives raided though tbh. But the seek times really slow loading smaller files down. I think if I do decide to keep them in a raid 0 config, I will ivest in a better defragmentation program that sorts the files in order of use. But I'm not sure I can get a program for an ntfs file system. so.. modtheplanet, what were you gonna use the raid array for??? just so we can clarify the use. and what advantage it will actually have. Oh, I also noticed that my when using my swap file, it was much faster. but then again, I have a gig of ram and rarely do I have 3ds max fired up. So it doesn't really get filled.
i do some video editing and run some big programs. i plan on have 2 sata 120 gig drive in a raid 0 config, then have a 120 eide drive for back ups, all in the same box.
Alright, then a raid 0 config is a good thing for you. Now, about getting a different drive for that raid array. You really should use two of the same drive. But it will work with two diffrent ones. I think it is more reliable or something if you have the same drives. It seems fin eto have different ones as you can see in my setup though. I think it is up to you. I would however try and get another one that is the same.
Reliablilty might actually be reduced by having 2 drives identicle. I read recently (in that article that 8-ball linked to in my raid vs raptor thread) that there is a very real possibility of both drives dieing at the same time if they are form the same batch. You are best off getting 2 drives of identical make, size and speed but from different batches. This is however no help to a raid0 array, as mr_tad said, as there is no redundency.
yeah.. the same specs is what I meant.. And I can see that from the same batch, they would die at a similar time. And a raid 0 vs raptor thread.. /me searches
yeah i can see how that would be best, with seek times and all too. WD has better seek times and that is pretty much what makes a hard drive good. ok now is there a good back up program that i could schedule to do back ups at certain times. I dont want to use the windows one, i hate the restore utility. I would like a 3rd party back up utility either freeware or retail.
It all depends how you want to back up... You could right a script using an *.bat file that just copies files in a certain directory into a network mapped drive... or you could use a cd or tape or whatever... Right now I currently just mannually ftp important stuff to my webserver in a secure directory as a back up. I will soon have another pc that will have a dir mapped to the webserver. The webserver will run a script. Once every day it will backup the data. I do know that there were progies that could do it for you. But I don't remember the link. I think there was something on this in either the linux and open souce or the networking and communication forum. Was quite useful. I may be making a progy that uses ftp that will backup all the files and folders you choose. Although I am not sure of how long this will take... since it has been a LONG time since I used the winsock control in vb.
