RAID Verified

[firstfolio]

I need someone with more experience than myself to verify if a RAID solution I want to try is workable.

What I want to do first is to tie two 74GB SATA HDDs together in RAID 0. Then I want to partition a third drive (250GB SATA) so that the partition is tied to the RAID 0 drives via RAID 1.

74GB----|
|---RAID 0 ------|
74GB----| |
|----RAID 1
|
250GB (150GB partition)---|

Is this possible? If so, what is the best way to implement it?

[Shorty]

Most controllers would not support that kind of setup as you want to mirror a RAID-0 array with a single drive.

What controller to you have on your mobo or are plugging in? :)

[Omega65]

Also wouldn't the combo only be as fast as the slowest drive? (the 250gb)

[Tex]

Yes it won't work. And they don't let you because you would rouine performance.

You need to BACKUP your raid arry to your seperate drive. its a MUCH better solution. Raid-1 is not a solution to keep from backing up. It protects against only ONE thing. A total hardware disk failure. But you backup to protect against many other types of failure. A corrupted file system. Deleted or corrupted files etc.. A controller failure etc... with raid-1 you kill the mirror at the same time you kill the original see?

Hang the big single drive off a seperate non raid controller and just backup to it. You can use a imaging tool or even XP's backup utility works pretty well.

Tex

[Omega65]

Dont forget to show us those PCIe 8x Raid controller results Tex!

[Tex]

you bet. The MB cpu should be here by Monday. Video card won't be but I can stick some cheesy pci video in untill it gets here.

tex

[firstfolio]

Most controllers would not support that kind of setup as you want to mirror a RAID-0 array with a single drive.

What controller to you have on your mobo or are plugging in? :)

Haven't decided on the board yet. Controller will be on the mobo though as I hate daughter cards. I only deal with them when I have to. Am I ging to need 4 drives to accomplish what I described or is there a solution I'm overlooking. All I am really looking for is speed (RAID 0) and security (RAID 1). I know about "matrix raid" but I'm trying to avoid Intel mobos.

[Tex]

Yes as we said. 4 drives to do raid 0+1 . (mirroring two raid-0 arrays. And as I said you would be better served not running raid-1 unless you also have extra drives to backup to ALSO). So you need 5 drives. 4 120's for your raid 0+1 and a 250gb to backup to.

Raid-1 is a solution for a company that has data that must always be online and they can not afford the time to restore from a backup if a drive crashed. Mission critical type apps. Stuff that has to run 24-7 or they lose tons of money. And even then they still have to BACKUP everything each night because as I mentioned raid-1 only solved one problem relating to data loss and there is a dozen others. But to a company with a mission critical app its worth the money even though they backup every night.

So use the big 250gb to just backup your dual drive raid-0 array. Save the money for your raid-1. Its not worth it for 95 percent of the home users and it doesnt keep ya from losing everything unless you backup anyway. I do this sort of stuff for a living and I have seen it happen to many times even running much more sophisticated high end scsi drives and controller much less the little software "toy" controllers found on MB's.

Tex