hi I just got 2 40gig maxtors(free from work ) and i am going to stripe them on raid 0.The drives are pata so i got 2 akasa pata to sata adaptors,so thay are now sata drives. when i get promted to press f6(when installing windows) to install the drivers is it only the raid driver i need to install or do i have to intsall some other driver for the disks. im sure i seen something about sata disks need a driver when thay are installed, but im not sure................and if thay do where do i get this driver from?? thanks for your hellp
just the raid driver when people talk about installing the driver for a disk its because the majority of onboard sata solutions use a 3rd party raid chip that needs a driver
Or you could raid them in Windows Drive Management Console. My Computer <- Right Click -Manage --Disk Management if that helps
I've been telling people about the fruitlessness and increased danger of using RAID striping for ages. If you want to experiment with it cool, but too many people use it for their main rig, often as their exclusive storage. Until things get completely away from the PCI bus and the norm becomes NATIVE SATA for both controllers and HDs it really is not worth bothering about. Even then onboard solutions are still likely to tie up the CPU (thus lowering perf) while add-in card versions are likely to be pricey and would require PCIe anyway. Native command queuing should help things too, both in and outside of RAID. I'd say screw it all if you are a consumer, just buy a large capacity fast single HD, or 2 if you need more capacity.
Wow, thanks for the info. I was seriously debating dropping about $500 on 4 raptors, and a raid controller, and now i'm not going to.
i'd say 4 raptors on a decent 64bit pci raid controller would certainly make some difference that SR quote is mostly in reference to having 2x drives in raid 0 using crappy onboard raid or a cheapy 32bit pci card
Even with a good RAID card and more than 2 HDs the gains really aren't that big unless you just run benchmarks all day long. The more drives you have in a striped array the bigger the chance of a failure destroying everything while implimenting mirroring is wasteful unless it's ALL mission critical. For consumer backing up it's hard to argue against DVD Writers drives and media which are both hideously cheap now. Then with RAID there's more headaches setting it up (eg choosing stripe size), installing drivers, hassle and/or limitation when you upgrade to a new system. As soon as you factor in cost RAID much like SCSI seems pretty pointless at consumer level, unless it's something you really want to toy with. The biggest benefit you'd probably see is that Windows would boot in '50 odd' seconds rather than 60. Surely loading things from HD isn't the main use you put your PC to? You may be able to find a better place to put your cash, such as a top gfx card if you're a gamer or loads of RAM if you're into digital editing. I also think the Raptors are over-priced and under-sized, perhaps look at the next best drives which are the Maxtor 16MB cache SATA drives which get a nice speed boost via Native Command Queuing (if the controller supports NCQ and ideally is native SATA). The other HDs that are well worth checking out are Seagate's, which should ALL now come with a superb 5 year warranty! Depending how you tend to use your PC there are still gains to be had by simply running multiple seperate HDs, and less headaches too.
if a single raptor can push 70/80 mB/s then 4 on a decent pci-x raid card will easily break 200 mB/s maybe even 300 that will make a difference, especially if you use any programs that need paging personally i have 3x250gig maxlines in raid 5 in my server and jsut a single raptor in my desktop machine definately worth the having the raid in my server
300MB/s is great for STR benchmarks but has little effect on real world performance, performance which is affected by access times, which raid has a negative effect on
There is a BIG difference between paper specs, synthetic benchmarks and the real world ... and it's only the real world that really counts. It's much in the same way as adding 2 CPUs to a system doesn't double the perf, much of the time it's no where near double the perf, and I'd say RAID is even less beneficial.
