Dynamic Volumes vs Basic

  • Thread starter Thread starter kawipoo
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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?
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?
 
I have recently added two SATA drives to my system and noticed a significant
performance boost going from UDMA5 to UDMA6 speed. Raid 0 is definitely the
way to go if you're looking to improve performance. I found a couple of
160GB Maxtor drives online (pricewatch.com) for $100 each; retail stores
sold them for around $160. If you plan on using dynamic partitions, solve
the backup issue beforehand because Ghost 2003 had a problem with them.
I've never needed more than 4 partitions on my system drive (currently have
2), so I only use basic partitions. There may be other tools that can
handle dynamic partitions, I never cared enough to look.

- Robert -
 
Of course I'm using RAID 0. RAID 0 only requires dynamic partitions if you
use Microsoft's tool to create a stripe set with one or more PATA drives.
My SATA controller (Silicon Image) has a BIOS which I used to low-level
format the drives and create the stripe set. WinXP sees a RAID 0 set with
320GB, which I broke up into two primary partitions... both stripped. If
that's your reason for using dynamic partitions, check your SATA
controller's documentation to see how to enter its BIOS. From there you
should be able to create a RAID 0 or 1 set. Then, you can use primary
partitions and not worry about finding a tool to use for backups.

- Robert -
 
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