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    To RAID or not to RAID?

    Piwafwi
    Piwafwi
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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty To RAID or not to RAID?

    Post by Piwafwi Sun May 11, 2008 1:20 pm

    Ok, I'm was thinking about setting up my hard drives in RAID 0, but I have little knowledge on this (even tho I built my comp from the ground up). When I go into configuring for RAID at the computer booting screen I select the volume and all and set it for RAID 0. I then get a warning that all info will be wiped/replaced/deleted for that specific volume. My question to yall who might be a little more tech-savvy is this: Will this process deleted all info on both my hard drives or will it just format for the intended volume?

    I don't want to have to reinstall all my software/OS stuff on my primary 'C' drive and I currently have nothing but Neverwinter Nights 2 on my second 'E' drive stored there. Lemme know!

    l8r...Vazz Twisted Evil
    FredMark
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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty Stripe is good for AoC

    Post by FredMark Sun May 11, 2008 2:17 pm

    My .02

    I am running 2 disks 460 Gb 10K RPM in stripe.

    in AOC, It makes a difference when you load, my load times are about 5 seconds (10 tops).

    Stripe does not give you any advantage in random access, only sequential. So things like loading large bulks of data will be almost twice faster. You will get more benefit when data is less fragmented (run defrag often).

    Disadvantage: If one drive is gone, you loose all information on both.

    You would need to have 2 disks that are absolutely identical. There is software solution that would allow to do it on different disks, but you will get minimal benefit.
    Piwafwi
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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty Re: To RAID or not to RAID?

    Post by Piwafwi Sun May 11, 2008 2:41 pm

    Ok, so does this process reformat both hard drives? Or does it just create volume/partition?

    Thanx for the assist.

    l8r...Vazz Twisted Evil
    FredMark
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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty Re-formatting

    Post by FredMark Sun May 11, 2008 6:06 pm

    Yes, the hardware stripe solution will re-build your harddrives.

    Trivialization of how it does it:

    Basically, it simulates sectors of two harddrives as it was one and it must organize sectors across two disks in that order.

    So if a single harddrive has 4 plates 8 heads, it sees 2 harrdrives as one having 8 plates 16 heads and organized harddrive sectors(segments) across them for sequential read. It also create address space that spawns across the whole stripe.

    So if, as a wild example, you have that setup and your sector size is 1K :
    out of that 16K file half will be physically stored on one harddrive and half on another.

    Thus, the bigger chunk there is for sequential read (or write), the bigger of your benefit.
    You will have some decrement from stripe if you want an access a single file of 1K in this example, and almost 100% (some overhead for RAID management) benefit if you read 1Gb.

    If you have hardware failure on one of harddrives, it has exactly the same effect as one of the heads/plates of the single harrdrive got broken - there will be no coherent data to recover.
    (there are solutions such as RAID5/7/10 to store some redundant information on other drives to prevent from hardware failure, typically at cost of 20-45% write IO overhead).

    In reality, SAN and NAS controllers have stripe size of much larger scale, between 1 and 10 MB typically. It is done in order to populate controller cache and maximize pre-caching of data.
    Piwafwi
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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty Re: To RAID or not to RAID?

    Post by Piwafwi Sun May 11, 2008 6:14 pm

    Thanx for the info. Looks like I won't be setting this up, but ya did give me some insight. Appreciate that!

    l8r...Vazz Twisted Evil

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    To RAID or not to RAID? Empty Re: To RAID or not to RAID?

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