36gb and 74gb Raptors in RAID possible?

SuperSaiyan4

Hi guys never linked up 2 hard drives before and currently use a 36gb raptor, i will be getting a used 74gb raptor soon and wanted to know how do i go about linking the 2 together - is it possible and will i benefit with any speed increase?


Would anyone be kind enough to explain the process to me please.

I have an Abit AN8 'Fatal1ty' motherboard NON-SLI latest bios, sata raid drivers installed already.

Using Win XP home latest up to date.

airbornflght

okay, here I go.



Simple Answer: Yes

Long Answer: Yes, BUT when you put them in a raid 1 or Raid 0, it will treat the 74gig as a 36, since that is the size of the smallest drive in the array. So you will be loosing half the space on your drive. What I would do is if you could afford it, but another raptor. Or betteryet, buy 4 cheaper, larger drives, and put them in a raid 5, or raid 1+0, and you will get about similar performace from what Ive heard.

You also have another option if you controller allows it. If you have the option of JBOD (just a bunch of drives) it will group all the drives in the array and treat them as one drive. Its sort of the ghetto rigging feature of raid arrays, but it works. Depending on what your going for.

If you want redundancy, then you want a raid 1, if you want a big drive, the you want raid 1. If you want both, than Raid 5/raid 0+1, if you want to put a bunch of mis matched drives in an array, than JBOD, please note that not all controllers will support all options listed. Most all controllers will support raid 1 and raid 0 though, almost definatly.

If you need any more help let us know.

Mt_Goat

It will work but as airbornflght mentioned the larger drive will only be the same capacity as the smaller drive and the rest will be lost. While 2 drives in a RAID-0 will provide some pretty benchmarks it won't be any better for average use than a single drive. I have payed with RAID for quite a while now and have come to the conclusion that it really isn't worth it for what most people do except video editing. RAID-0 does not improve your access time and that is much more important for your operating system and applications that a high sustained transfer rate at the upper range of file sizes. You would be better off puting your OS on one and your files on the other. I currently only use 2 out of my 6 drives in a RAID-0 array and that is for file storage with large segment files. It is all much faster than when I had everything on 4 74GB Raptors.

SuperSaiyan4

So there is no way of putting 2 different sized hard drives together to get ALL the space? Ouch.

Please excuse my lack of knowledge on RAID even though I am a sytem builder...but what does RAID 0 and 1 or 5 mean? Please could you give an explanation on its terms and functions over each type of RAID.

But if I plug in my 74gb and not set it up as RAID the PC will see it as a seperate hard drive right? Meaning it will see it as a 74gb.

I have Norton system works and I think it has ghost on it - is it possible to ghost everything from my 36gb including operating system to the 74gb and then wipe the 36gb clean?

Because if I cannot get the 2 drives to work side by side as FULL space not half of the 74gb due to the smaller hard drive I might just keep the 74gb and sell the 36gb.

airbornflght

Okay. Here I go, perhaps I should make an article on this.


Raid 0 is stripping, that means that it takes to drives and puts them in a big "stripe" if you have to 36gig drives, then it will treat it as one 72gig drive.

Raid 1 is data mirroring. Which means that the data from one drive is mirrored onto the other. Which is where the redundany comes from. Some say that the read performance is a little better for this array, but the writting performance takes a hit because it has to write the data to both drives. Generally though, it is not noticable now days.

Raid 5 provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID although, I think that it takes a pretty good performance hit. The next to have pretty much replaced raid 5 in home systems.

Raid 0+1 is a mirror of stripes. Meaning that lets say you have 4 36gb drives this time. You make two raid 0 arrays out of them. Giving you two arrays that are 72gb. Now you decide you want to still have redundancy, so you mirror them. So you are mirroring the stripe.

Raid 10 is the oposite of raid 0+1. It is a stripe of mirrors. I don't know enough to go into detail on this one.


As far as I know the only difference between Raid 5/Radi 1+0/Raid 10 is the redundancy and how many/which drives can fail simultaneously before the entire array must be rebuilt. I think Raid 5 is the best if you need redundancy, but like I said, I'm pretty sure it is also the slowest at writing.

Okay, now we need to talk into the mismatching of drives. Normally, and under good style, when you build an array, you usually use the same drive (make/model) and the same capacity. Although none of these have to be done this way. If you mismatch the drive models/manufactures, the array performance will just likely take a hit, although it will still work. If you mismatch the drive size, the array will still work, but the Raid controller with treat all the drives in the array as whatever size the smallest drive in the array is. So, if you have a 30gb, thre 60gb, and two 250gb drives in a raid 0 array (striping) it will treat all siz drives as 30gb drives, so your array would only be 180gb.

Now there is an exception to this, the JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks/Drives) array. you could say that JBOD is the opposite of partitioning, in that it takes multiple drives and treats them as one logical one. In that it consists of an Array of Independent Disks (no redundancy), it can be thought of as a distant relation to RAID. JBOD is sometimes used to turn several odd-sized drives into one useful drive. Therefore, JBOD could use a 3 GB, 15 GB, 5.5 GB, and 12 GB drive to combine into a logical drive at 35.5 GB, which is often more useful than the individual drives separately.

I'm sure that I made a few mistakes, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

SuperSaiyan4

Thanks for the reply.

So in sense basically I either can have 2 seperate hard drives each with their own capacity or link the two but take a hit on storage space.

Now this is what I might do instead, I will want to keep the 74gb hard drive but get rid of the 36gb, will Norton Ghost allow me to COPY everything from my 36gb including operating system as clone to the 74gb hard drive, allowing me to then just format the 36gb and sell it?

Mt_Goat

You can use Ghost to clone your current drive to the new drive. Don't copy just the partition but the entire drive as the boot.ini files are separate on the drive. If the cloned copy is not bootable you can still create a new boot file from the XP disc. It's been a while since I used Ghost so I can't recall what else may be involved.

SuperSaiyan4

So once I have done a copy the hard drive say doesnt boot then what do I need to do? I appreciate your help thus far.

airbornflght

You can try and rebuild it following a guide thrax has posted, otherwise, format it and do a clean install, then sell the 36giger to me:D

I would back up any and all files (images/music/savegames) that you absolutely need to save prior to ghosting it. Might save you some headache if you have to format.

SuperSaiyan4

Emm I rather not do a clean reinstall I have reinstalled my op system loads of times and its XP OEM - already had to ring Microsoft to approve the installation i.e. the code.

Too much hassle installing the 74gb I think I might just sell it instead :-( its 3months old - bought it used from a friend and its still got warranty.

But I am in the UK and you are in the US...

airbornflght

you could ship it as a "gift" I shipped some ram to canada and it was like $6-$8(i forget easily)(which is kind of expensive for a quarter pound stick of ram..) i think. I''ll pm you my address and if you can tell me how much it would be to shipp it stateside and how much you want for the drive, maybe we can strike up a deal. I would hope that it wouldnt be more than $15 to ship it.

Shorty, whats the cheapest way to ship something stateside?

SuperSaiyan4

Hi mate, got your PM and have replied - although is it ok to be discussing the sale of items?

Mt_Goat

SuperSaiyan4 wrote:

Hi mate, got your PM and have replied - although is it ok to be discussing the sale of items?

As long as it is legal, private deals through PM's are OK.

Keep it private and no one will get a visit from Bruno.

airbornflght

Yeh, normally items for sale will be advertised in the deal depot, then will go to pm's to discuss the terms of the sale. That way there is less overall drama since everyone cant see what the other person is offering/got it for.

Replied

SuperSaiyan4

Ok I might list it there, I dont have the HDD on me yet but once I have it should be in a couple of days or tomorrow will list it in the deals section.