My Raid situation:

Hacker3

Hello all you RAID Pros out there. I built a computer last fall and setup a RAID 0 configuration with 2 Maxtor 60gig hard drives before really learning much about RAID. I then partitioned each drive into 20gig partitions giving me c,f,g on drive 1 and h,i,j on drive 2. (drives d & e are cd rom drives). Now then, am I correct in saying when ever I copy something to drive C, 1/2 of the information is being written to the first partition on the second drive which would be H? Or did I totally mess up this array by partitioning the drives the way I did? Windows shows information being written to C but H is empty. I'm not sure what should be happening or if I can copy stuff to H without messing up the drive.
Lastly, I'm getting mixed reports as to whether or not I can defrag my hard drives using windows defragmenter. Asus Tech support says no way should you defrag a RAID configuration due to it's very nature of being fragmented. Yet everybody else I've talked to claim to defrag their RAID 0 all the time without any problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Hacker3 (golf hacker, not a computer hacker)

Tex

Hacker3 wrote:

Hello all you RAID Pros out there. I built a computer last fall and setup a RAID 0 configuration with 2 Maxtor 60gig hard drives before really learning much about RAID. I then partitioned each drive into 20gig partitions giving me c,f,g on drive 1 and h,i,j on drive 2. (drives d & e are cd rom drives). Now then, am I correct in saying when ever I copy something to drive C, 1/2 of the information is being written to the first partition on the second drive which would be H? Or did I totally mess up this array by partitioning the drives the way I did? Windows shows information being written to C but H is empty. I'm not sure what should be happening or if I can copy stuff to H without messing up the drive.
Lastly, I'm getting mixed reports as to whether or not I can defrag my hard drives using windows defragmenter. Asus Tech support says no way should you defrag a RAID configuration due to it's very nature of being fragmented. Yet everybody else I've talked to claim to defrag their RAID 0 all the time without any problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Hacker3 (golf hacker, not a computer hacker)

I think your confused. If you made a raid-0 arrray with two 60gb drives you will no longer see two seperate drives but rather one large 120gb drive. You could not therefore control that you created a partiton on one drive or the other any longer. When you create lets say a 20gb c drive it resides half on one and half on the other and its invisiable to you. But it breakes up a file you copy to the "c" drive into pieces the size of the "stripe" you selected when you created the array and alternates writing one to one drive and one to an another and ... whoever told you that at Asus is a moron. if you don't keep your raid-0 array defragged constantly you lose all the benefit of raid-0 and your performance will be crushed. You want the heads on each drive to stay locked and continue to read contiguos data blocks. Your performnce dips every time the heads have to reposition basicly.

I woudl be more then happy to help you setup your raid array properly. I taught a lot the young'ns here about raid a while back... (grin)

Cheers

Tex

Mt_Goat

Tex even taught a few of us old dogs a few tricks.

Hacker3, you are in good hands!

ginipig

Tex, what programs do you use to defrag your raid array?

My array is at 16/16- making it hard for programs like diskeeper or perfect disk to operate. I've been searching far and wide for a defragmenter that will support 16k clusters.

Tex

With win2k you only have speed disk from norton as all the others use the windows api's.

With XP I think its fixed isnt it?

Tex

Hacker3

Tex wrote:

I think your confused. If you made a raid-0 arrray with two 60gb drives you will no longer see two seperate drives but rather one large 120gb drive. You could not therefore control that you created a partiton on one drive or the other any longer. When you create lets say a 20gb c drive it resides half on one and half on the other and its invisiable to you. But it breakes up a file you copy to the "c" drive into pieces the size of the "stripe" you selected when you created the array and alternates writing one to one drive and one to an another and ... whoever told you that at Asus is a moron. if you don't keep your raid-0 array defragged constantly you lose all the benefit of raid-0 and your performance will be crushed. You want the heads on each drive to stay locked and continue to read contiguos data blocks. Your performnce dips every time the heads have to reposition basicly.

I woudl be more then happy to help you setup your raid array properly. I taught a lot the young'ns here about raid a while back... (grin)

Cheers

Tex

Thanks for the additional info, I have a better understanding now. At least now I know I can use all of my partitions for writing data too. What would you recommend for a properly setup RAID array? Mine seems to be working fine except I did make the big mistake of putting both drives on the same channel. My P4C800 Deluxe mobo only has one RAID IDE channel so I didn't have much of a choice. I wish I would of purchased sata drives because there are two sata controllers but otherwise it seems to be working fine. Any additional help would be appreciated. I know what you mean with the moron comment. It's hard to find good help these days and that is why I come to forums such as this. There is such good help with knowledgeable people such as yourself. I did, however, call 3 different time to ASUS and all said the same thing! Absolutely do not defrag RAID arraya unless you want to suffer dire consequences with your data. However, with your advice, I'm defragging, besides I have been anyway and haven't had problems.

Hacker 3 (golf hacker, not a computer hacker)

Tex

I have defragged weekly for years with a wide variety of controllers. Your as likely to suffer a defrag catastrophe ( and they happen ) where it scrambles the sh*t out of your entire drive on a single drivce as much as a raided one. Alwys do a disk check first to make sure its sound. defragging one that has probs before the defrag just kills ya big time. Defragging heavily uses your system ram. So defragging one with memory thats a little flaky or on a heavily OC'd machine or one tahts just getting flaky for many other reasons can also kill ya. And remeber with raid-0.... I have done storage systems for years both as a hobby and professionaly and the rule with raid-o is always... Don't put anything on raid-0 you can't afford to lose. Your possiblitys of losing everything are much higer. With 2 drives your twice as likely as usinga single drive due to just mechanical failure alone. Four drives.... 4 times as high.... back your important stuff up either to another computer on your network or to another big ide drive or dvfd's or SOMETHING. I usualy image a install after its all configured to another non-raid drive but I keep my key stuff always backed up. You may go a year or two and be fine or... you may lose it all in 6 weeks. Tons of guys lose drives they bought less then 6 months ago.

If therre was any one thing I would love to drill into everyones brain here its the imprtance of backing up. With a normal drive you trash the filesystem but if the drives is ok you can use software to recover most the data. Not with raid usually.

tex

And you can grab a cheap two channel hpt or promise raid controller on ebay for 25 to 40 bucks.

Flintstone

Something you said, Hacker3, sounded a little suspicious. You said that there is an SATA raid controller on the board but that you couldn't afford to use it by buying new drives. Does that MB have 2 raid controllers on it? I can't remember seeing a PATA onboard raid controller with only 1 channel! Are you absolutely sure you set up a raid array at all?

Just a thought from what I read in your posts. I'm too lazy to go look up the features of your board to see if what I say is even a possibility, so take it for what it's worth.


Flint