Dynamic versus Basic Volume

[kawipoo]

I recently bought a computer which has two SATA ports that are RAID 0
supported. My question is it worth the effort to buy a couple of SATA hard
drives and use the RAID 0 support? Is there a large boost in performance?
I do quite a bit of video editing.
if so I was planning on keeping the IDE drives for backup. Does anyone have
experience with a good backup software for dynamic volumes? Does Ghost or
Disk Image 7 work?

 

[R. McCarty]

Only Ghost 2003 has built-in provisions for imaging a
Dynamic drive. However, it can only write the data out
to a "Basic" format. (Loosing it's Dynamic status & it
complicates recovery). I don't believe that Drive Image
7.0 supports Dynamic drives.

If you opt for a Striped array (Raid 0), it is not necessary
to use Dynamic, you can create Basic volumes on it.

Raid is faster - but if one member of the set fails, you
loose all the data. There is no redundancy with Raid 0.

There are lots of web sites that discuss Raid and the
differing levels of Raid (0-5).

Disk speed has many different aspects, Disk rotational
speed, access times, cache size, et. Then you have the
different types of drives PATA IDE, Serial ATA. You
should download DiskSpeed32 to test your current
drives throughput and from those numbers decide if you
want to move to a Raid configuration.

 

[kawipoo]

I thought RAID 0 in itself is dynamic because the volume spans more than 1
disk.

 

[R. McCarty]

We may be discussing apples and oranges. What I was
speaking of is the type of partition or volume. Windows
has two types a "Basic" disk and a "Dynamic" disk.

A Dynamic disk is completely handled by Windows XP.
Most disk tools (PQMagic,etc) will only detect it as a
Dynamic volume and be unable to change or modify it.
In other words, XP has total control over a Dynamic
volume. When working outside of Windows the disk is
not visible.

When you create a Raid Array the controller handles
the drives, but it (array) can be partitioned and formatted
to either type of disk (Basic or Dynamic).