RAID1 Boot Drive

[Atkinson]

I am considering using the RAID1 capability of my motherboard to make
the Boot and System drive a RAID1 (mirrored) array. Some people have
told me that I will take a big performance hit doing this, but I have
found articles that show the performance hit is very small.

What are the feelings of this group? Is a RAID1 boot disk a good idea?

-Landy

 

[DL]

I've used Raid1 (mobo controler SATA drives) + win2k I've seen no
performance hit.
When a mirror drive failed I was running again in the time it took to
disconnect failed drive.

 

[Guest]

Hi Atkinson,
Theoretically you may face some performance hits but if you ask me, I have
done it a number of times and have not faced any problem. Although it has
been very helpful when one of the disk fails.

Theoretically,
RAID 1 is disk mirroring. Two drives store identical information so that one
is a mirror of the other. For every disk operation, the system must write the
same information to both disks. Because dual write operations can degrade
system performance, many employ duplexing, where each mirror drive has it own
host adapter. While the mirror approach provides good fault tolerance, it is
relatively expensive to implement, because only half of the available disk
space can be used for storage while the other is used for mirroring.

Following might be helpful:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;100110

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/maintain/operate/11w2kada.mspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;114779

Lukesh

 

[DL]

I dont believe most of the kb articles are applicable to a hw mirror
implimentation

 

[Guest]

Hi,
Yeah but I have not gotten any problem yet with any mirror, hardware or
software. I reckon the hardware mirror is a lot beter in performance.

Lukesh