RAID Verified

firstfoliofirstfolio
edited March 2005 in Hardware
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?

Comments

  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    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? :)
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited March 2005
    Also wouldn't the combo only be as fast as the slowest drive? (the 250gb)
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2005
    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
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited March 2005
    Dont forget to show us those PCIe 8x Raid controller results Tex!
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2005
    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
  • firstfoliofirstfolio
    edited March 2005
    Shorty wrote:
    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.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2005
    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
Sign In or Register to comment.