Intel Raid

  • Thread starter Thread starter TonyK
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TonyK

I bought a new system, and it has some Intel s/w to configure multiple hard
drives to do RAID 0,1 or 5. Does anyone know if this RAID is done in s/w or
h/w on my mainboard? I'm worried if I go thru the trouble of making that
work, and it is a s/w RAID, that my system performance will suffer.
Comments?

Thanks,
Tony
 
Check the documentation or the web site. More than likely hardware raid that
you configure in drive controller bios prior to operating system
installation.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
|I bought a new system, and it has some Intel s/w to configure multiple hard
| drives to do RAID 0,1 or 5. Does anyone know if this RAID is done in s/w
or
| h/w on my mainboard? I'm worried if I go thru the trouble of making that
| work, and it is a s/w RAID, that my system performance will suffer.
| Comments?
|
| Thanks,
| Tony
|
|
|
 
TonyK said:
I bought a new system, and it has some Intel s/w to configure
multiple hard drives to do RAID 0,1 or 5. Does anyone know if this
RAID is done in s/w or h/w on my mainboard? I'm worried if I go thru
the trouble of making that work, and it is a s/w RAID, that my system
performance will suffer. Comments?

Thanks,
Tony
Click to expand...

Most on board RAID solutions are a combination of hardware/software. The CPU
takes a small hit, not as much as true software RAID. A stand alone hardware
controller has it's own CPU and has the potential to be significantly faster
than most on board solutions. What are you trying to accomplish? Knowing
this will make it easier to make a recommendation. If you are looking for
performance then any RAID 0 solution will be faster than a non RAID 0
system. In most cases the speed increase can be measured but it is not
significant enough that most users would notice a difference. The downside
is you are more than doubling your chances for data loss due to a disk
failure so you need a good backup strategy. If you are thinking of using
RAID 1 or 5 as a backup strategy this is not a good idea. They are for
redundancy in the case of a disk failure. You are not protected against data
corruption, hardware failures other than a disk, or environmental issues
like fires, power surges, theft, etc..
 
I am primarily interested in securing against a catastrophic disk failure.
I was thinking of a RAID 5 to do what I want. Yes I know there are many
things that can go wrong. I suppose the only way around some of those
issues is with a good backup procedure. But for now, I just want to ensure
my data does not die when 1 HDD fails.

Thanks for your response.

Tony
 
TonyK said:
I am primarily interested in securing against a catastrophic disk
failure. I was thinking of a RAID 5 to do what I want. Yes I know
there are many things that can go wrong. I suppose the only way
around some of those issues is with a good backup procedure. But for
now, I just want to ensure my data does not die when 1 HDD fails.
Click to expand...


Your choice of course, but I'd like to echo what Kerry said below. Using
RAID 5 may make it seem like your are ensuring that you data doesn't die,
but it doesn't really.
 
I would recommend RAID 1. Although RAID 5 can be done with as few as three
disks there is a performance penalty. RAID 5 really works best when you get
around five disks in the array. Most personal computers aren't designed for
this many hard drives.

Again, I caution you RAID is for fault tolerance and is not a substitute for
a backup plan. It is to keep a computer running when a hard drive fails
until down time can be scheduled to replace the failed drive. More data is
lost data from file system corruption than from failed hard drives.
 
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