Raid ??

[Abarbarian]

I have two 320 GB Seagate 7200.10 drives and one 500 GB Seagate 7200.11 drive.

I have installed XP on the 7200.11 drive as it is the faster drive. Will I get better performance all round and in games if I use the 7200.10 drives in a Raid array and have XP on it ??

Or could I use the 7200.11 on its own in a Raid array with XP on it ?? I believe this is possible and would mean that I would in effect hava 250 GB 7200.11 disk.

 

[floppybootstomp]

The increase in performance you'd gain from using the two 320Gb drives in a RAID 0 config would be negligible but why not give it a shot?

You've nothing to lose except, maybe, upping the chances of lost data by having two drives as one, in case of disk failure.

If you don't detect a performance increase, back up the whole OS to the 500Gb disk then reinstall to a single 320Gb disk. Assuming you have some backup software such as Acronis True Image to do that, otherwise just do a fresh install.

And no, you couldn't use 2 x 250Gb partitions on the 500Gb disk for a RAID 0 config, you need to have physically seperate drives for that.

 

[Mike the tech guy]

Heya,

Can't see that you will get any performace increase by setting up a raid, just better redundancy and resilliency... Floppy's right with it all.

 

[Abarbarian]

I just wanted to say that the problem has been solved and thank you for your input. You were right about the raid controller. I went into the Nvidia Mediashield prog. and set up the single drive as a standalone Spanning and after I did that I check the Disk Management program and the new HD appeared. I then formatted it and the rest is history. Thanks again for your help I guess I really didn't have any other way to it. When I boot now it says I have 2 Healthy raid arrays, my original Raid0 and my new single drive, which is kinda weird but hey it works.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-248988_14_0.html

Ta for the input guys. The above is where I got the idea you could set up Raid on a single disk. Are these folk getting it wrong ?? Me I'm just learning so expect daft q's.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Frankly, Abarb, you've confused me.

From your original post, one wouldn't assume there was a problem as such, seems you were just seeking advice.

I'll have to study this tomorrow when I'm less tired/sozzled.

RAID on one disk? What kind of array?

And, most pertinent - what is the point of setting up RAID on one disk? Pointless.

 

[Mike the tech guy]

I'll agree with Floppy, having raid on 1 physical disk, defeats the point of having raid at all, and would also reduce the amount of disk space available - dont think it's actually possible, nor just having a SATA drive hooked upto a raid controller(which is basically just a sata controller card) will work as a normal disk, but i think peoplr get confused when RAID get's mentioned...Anyhow, glad its sorted mate.

 

[Abarbarian]

Frankly, Abarb, you've confused me.

From your original post, one wouldn't assume there was a problem as such, seems you were just seeking advice.

I'll have to study this tomorrow when I'm less tired/sozzled.

RAID on one disk? What kind of array?

And, most pertinent - what is the point of setting up RAID on one disk? Pointless.

Yup was just asking advice.

Will Raid on 2 x 320 GB 7200.10's running XP be better for gaming than a XP install on a single 7200.11 500 GB disk.

If Raid is better for gaming,

Putting Raid on to a single 500 GB 7200.11. If that is possible will of course cut my drives capacity in half but if the gaming is better then I could live with that.

I.m using a ASUS M2N32 mobo and it has the Nvidia MediaShield so I'm guessing that it is a software raid setup rather than a hardware raid setup. I was reading up on Raid in general and think I understand what it is about. However I could not get a clear idea about the effects of raid for gaming. Some information suggested that start ups and level loading were faster but actuall gaming was not really noticably better. Plenty of info on Raid itself but very limited info on actuall results from running Raid with programs. So I posted here to see if anyone had any real time experience of running raid and gaming.

I have a decent graphics card and 4 GB of ram so gaming should be good. As I am just setting up and have the parts lying around I thought I might give the Raid a go if it would provide me with a better experience.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Win XP on RAID 0 on 2 x 320Gb HHD's will be better for gaming than a single XP install on a 500Gb HDD - on paper, anyway.

The 7200 suffix is of little importance here imo, I'd ignore the .10 & .11.

The two 320Gb disks will give you a hard disk capacity of around a genuine size of 600Gb.

If you had a spare 750Gb HDD (or, indeed, another pair of 320's) you could have stuck that on the RAID controller and used it in RAID 1 config to back up the 2 x 320Gb's but your 500Gb is too small for the job.

I will repeat though, that setting up a RAID 0 on 2 partitions on a single disk is pointless. My guess is that it will actually run slower than the single disk, there will be a bottleneck of data between the partitions and the controller.

If it were me, now that the 500 is formatted, I'd put it on a normal SATA port.

One note though, if you do install XP to the pair of 320's, leave the 500Gb disk disconnected during setup as otherwise XP will see it as drive C. You want your RAID config to be drive C. And don't forget to make the floppy disk with the RAID drivers for use during install. Right at the very beginning of the setup, with the floppy disk in the drive, XP will prompt you to hit F6 and the RAID drivers will load from the floppy.

I'd encourage the RAID 0 setup with the pair of 320's. Go on, do it, you may be pleasantly surprised or you may think 'Now what was the point of that?'

Lots of factors come into play, so try it.

 

[Mike the tech guy]

Hi again,


Yep i'd agree with Floppy again. In my opinion, i doubt that you will see an improvemtn for gaming by setting up a Raid setup, in all honesty if anything i would probably say that it would cause a slowdown as with a raid setup(depending on the setup) data is being constantly written between drives which creates more disk activity, as i say in my opinion(and i'm really only coming from a business angle) raid is for redundancy and resilliency, that little piece of mind that if your HDD was to go pete tong you've got the other to fall back on. Anyway give it a go, you can't go wrong and even if it doesnt improve speed etc, you've still got that backup in place. Let us know how you get on and what you decide tho!

 

[Abarbarian]

Thanks again guys.

I'll have to think about this for a while. Been reading and assimilating lots of stuff lately so may just give the raid a miss as I am getting twitchy fingers and need to kill a few aliens or germans or anything at all.

 

[Madxgraphics]

or germans

Poor Germans..They always get a bad deal...NOT!!!