Make the best out of the bad?

Jeff34Buff

Hi, I'm a new convert, over the past couple of weeks I've lurked, looked, folded, joined, & enjoyed the site so far.

I'm sorry that my first post is regarding the death of a hard drive, my very own dear drive, bit the dust yesterday. I'm thankfull for my laptop, or I'd be in a panic. HP will replace my hard drive according to the local hardware source, it will however take "a week or two" to get the "part" in. Never mind they had a Seagate Barracuda just like mine on the shelf.

I didn't want to wait. I was in the middle of modding the system into a new box that had a lot more space. I wouldn't wait a couple of weeks. Sighting a bargain I scooped up a couple of identical 80 GB Western Digital 7200 8MB cache ATA hard drives. More fun (I hope) than a larger SATA drive that was close in price. I'm hoping a RAID 0 setup will give me good performance.

Never mind the fact that I've never done a RAID before & actually don't know about it. I've asked around a little & was told it would be easy. Usually I do more research, but with a dead computer I had to move fast.

Please pardon the length of this post, I'm not familiar with protocol here.

I have an ASUS PTGD1 motherboard with a ICH6 Southbridge. CPU is a P4 3.0G running XP home. Do I need a PCI card with a controller or will the motherboard work? Did I make an error taking a plunge with RAID? Please point me in the direction for a good "How To Set up a RAID 0" page or site. I'll probably need some software because if RAID isn't P"n"P I'm gonna be lost from the beginning. Thanks for any input -

Jeff

P.S. Am I going to regret this?

Mt_Goat

If I am not mistaked tha board will support RAID natively through the ICH6 southbridge. But It is SATA and not IDE. You would need a floppy w/ the SAYA/RAID drivers so the Windows XP install detects the drives so as to install XP on yo the array you would set up. You should use a stripe size of 16 if possible and after XP is installed use a program ple Partition magic to re-size the clusters to 16 for best performance. Wheter or not you see a real performance gain in this particular set-up is questionable. I also VERY STRONGLY RECOMEND a separate drive to keep things regularly backed up on as you increase you chances of data loss with RAID.

Jeff34Buff

mtgoat wrote:

If I am not mistaked tha board will support RAID natively through the ICH6 southbridge. But It is SATA and not IDE. You would need a floppy w/ the SAYA/RAID drivers so the Windows XP install detects the drives so as to install XP on yo the array you would set up. You should use a stripe size of 16 if possible and after XP is installed use a program ple Partition magic to re-size the clusters to 16 for best performance. Wheter or not you see a real performance gain in this particular set-up is questionable. I also VERY STRONGLY RECOMEND a separate drive to keep things regularly backed up on as you increase you chances of data loss with RAID.

That's what I'm going to use the 200GB seagate for in a "couple of weeks" Due to the demise of my previous HD, I will have very little to lose because I'll be working off backups anyway.

I have another question, should I get everything started, up and running - then add the other drive; or set them both up and start fresh with the RAID 0 from the beginning?

Mt_Goat

Jeff34Buff wrote:

That's what I'm going to use the 200GB seagate for in a "couple of weeks" Due to the demise of my previous HD, I will have very little to lose because I'll be working off backups anyway.

I have another question, should I get everything started, up and running - then add the other drive; or set them both up and start fresh with the RAID 0 from the beginning?

I would say that if you have a program to resize clusters and it will only take a very short while to get the Seagate for backup to just set-up the array now.

But back to the beginning for a minute:
Does your motherboard have SATA headers on it for the RAID and the drives you are looking at IDE (PATA)? If so you would need SARA drives or funky adapters that are a real pain.

Jeff34Buff

Yes, it has SATA headers, but there is also an IDE header that can control two devices - currently unused. I was hoping that would work.

Mt_Goat

Jeff34Buff wrote:

Yes, it has SATA headers, but there is also an IDE header that can control two devices - currently unused. I was hoping that would work.

You NEVER EVER want to put 2 raided drives on the same cable!!!

It will greatly affect performance.

Jeff34Buff

OK, then I'm gonna need a PCI RAID control card. Saturday night! I wonder if they've got them at 7-11?

Just kidding, but I am getting close to the wire. Any reccomendations? Remember, I'm doing an unplanned upgrade and have a near 0 budget!

Thanks for the help

Mt_Goat

I would just return the drives for a refund and buy 2 SATA drives from Newegg.com. it would be cheaper than buying a decent controller. And the performance of the native ICH6 controller is superb!

Tex

HERE IS THE SETUP AGAIN....He has no time left and a zero budget. Hello? Is anyone else living in the real world with me anymore?

Two raid drives on one header is a 10 to 15 percent performance penalty hit.

If that IDE header supports raid and he is convinced its the best choice for him (and I am not) I say go for it.

Some of us spend days tweeking to squeeze an extra 3 percent out of a raid setup. He is not in that situation. Be able to seperate our bizarre raid-0 fantasy world with normal users that think we are just sick and twisted for a moment.

Tex

Tex

Jeff34Buff wrote:

OK, then I'm gonna need a PCI RAID control card. Saturday night! I wonder if they've got them at 7-11?

You can also get ide to sata converters. (again not at 7-11 either)

I've used them. More wires, more crap, more junk to possibly muck things up. I'm a keep it simple guy in general.

Yes I got them to perform, but your creating a very fragile raid-0 environment thats very open to problems.

If you want your raid-0 to be always "up" try and keep your possible points of failure/problems to a minimum. And as mentioned BACK THAT BABY UP.

tex

KingFish

Tests have shown that real world performance is not positively affected with raid 0 setups. Synthetic benchmarks show gains but real world application loading times are nearly the same as a single drive. You double your chance of data loss with a raid 0 setup though. As you know from your recently hard drive loss that it surely can happen too. If one of your hard drives fail in a raid 0 setup there is no chance of data recovery. Today's sata drives, especially the raptors, provide decent performance and would be the recommended setup. Try other tricks like moving your paging file to another hard drive and some of your applications to another hard drive besides the one storing your operating system. Use disk cleanup and defrag regularly. Raid 0 used to be the hot setup but has fallen out of favor nowadays.

Tex

KingFish wrote:

Tests have shown that real world performance is not positively affected with raid 0 setups. Synthetic benchmarks show gains but real world application loading times are nearly the same as a single drive. You double your chance of data loss with a raid 0 setup though. As you know from your recently hard drive loss that it surely can happen too. If one of your hard drives fail in a raid 0 setup there is no chance of data recovery. Today's sata drives, especially the raptors, provide decent performance and would be the recommended setup. Try other tricks like moving your paging file to another hard drive and some of your applications to another hard drive besides the one storing your operating system. Use disk cleanup and defrag regularly. Raid 0 used to be the hot setup but has fallen out of favor nowadays.

Bingo. Number one answer on the board.. Please step up and claim your prize.

And I thought I was the only one that knew the words to this song. (grin)

Tex

Mt_Goat

Tex wrote:

Bingo. Number one answer on the board.. Please step up and claim your prize.

And I thought I was the only one that knew the words to this song. (grin)

Tex

Ahhem! Excuse me.

......from the original reply in post #2.......

mtgoat wrote:

.....Wheter or not you see a real performance gain in this particular set-up is questionable. I also VERY STRONGLY RECOMEND a separate drive to keep things regularly backed up on as you increase you chances of data loss with RAID. ...

and after switching my own set-up to;

WD740 Raptor = C: (20GB) Windows and support progs / D: (56GB) My Documents
WD740 Raptor = E: (20GB) Adobe scratch pad, etc. / F: (56GB) Progam Files
WD360 Raptor = X: (10GB) 4GB Swap File
Seagate 200 = L: (140GB) Backup / M: (50GB) Extra Storage

from this post in this thread.

I am much happier and am seeing a much improved real world improvement including "feel". This set-up really flies!:)

KingFish wrote:

.....Today's sata drives, especially the raptors, provide decent performance and would be the recommended setup. ...

AMEN!
I would actually trade in those 2 80GB JB's he just got for one WD740 Raptor like the 2 I have as it definitely would be the wisest sue of funds.

Jeff34Buff

Thanks for all the help to everyone. I went to the store and found: Tons of ATA drives of all sorts and flavors (Ultra, ATA2, etc.), 1 ATA controller controller card, a few SATA drives and a couple of SATA controllers. I didn't buy anything. the current plan is to cash in the 2 ATA drives for 1 SATA. But now I'm thinking why bother?

If RAID 0 won't increase performance I won't bother with it. I do a lot of muti-tasking, Firefox, Outlook, Photoshop run all the time. Lots of MP3 related activity. I had some fun money left after a RAM upgrade cost less than expected. Thought RAID would give me a lot of bang for the buck. But the consensus here seems to be that I wouldn't notice much difference between a single or 2 RAID 0 SATA drives. It isn't like linking video cards SLI for example.

Thanks for the input, keep it going if you have any other ideas.

Mt_Goat

Just get one Western digital Raptor, preferably the 74GB model as it is second generation and performs noticeably better than the 36GB model. Noting I see that you lised woud directly benefit. Initially I just wanted to answer your questions and let you decide but fortunately other chimed in. In the past most who ask have just gone ahead and done it anyway then realized it wasn't worth it or had horrible problems.

Tex

mtgoat wrote:

Just get one Western digital Raptor, preferably the 74GB model as it is second generation and performs noticeably better than the 36GB model. Noting I see that you lised woud directly benefit. Initially I just wanted to answer your questions and let you decide but fortunately other chimed in. In the past most who ask have just gone ahead and done it anyway then realized it wasn't worth it or had horrible problems.

Agree. Excellant advice.

Kudo's

tex

Jeff34Buff

Well, if there is no advantage to a raid setup then I don't really need to spend upgrade funds on a second drive. The raptor spinning at 10k is probably much better than the seagate barracuda that I already have, but the best price I could find on Raptors was $129. I started down this road with 2 WD ATA 80G drives that I got for $35 each. I'll keep one temporarily for evaluation (I have 2 weeks to return it), but I think I'll end up just using my repaired/replaced seagate SATA.

Unless I've missed something?

Thanks for all the help

Tex

There are advantages for SOME things. For many you won't see any big improvement. Some things are slower with ide raid. Its a mixed bag really depending on your specific targeted usage.

But for $35 bucks if you end up wanting to sell one of those drives I'm in on this deal. (grin)

I do this for a living and if I were you I would not raid them and just try and divide the I-O up across both drives as much as possible.

there are valid reasons to run raid-0 on ide drives but you really have not coughed up one yet.

Best of Luck

Tex

Jeff34Buff

That's why I snagged them up quick I figured to do my research later. They were at Circuit City. I just returned one of them, I don't know if they're still on sale or not. $89 with $55 in rebates. I figured for $35, I can use it for a page file, backups, who knows.