SATA Drives Question

[Israel Richner]

My IDE 80 GB drive just failed :-(, but I do have a WD SATA 120 GB
150mb/s drive . So what I want to do now is buy another SATA drive
and set them up for redundency.

Questions:

1) Do I need to get a drive of the same size?

2) My mother board only supports SATA transfers of 150mb/s, and my
current SATA drive is 150 mb/s, can I buy a 300 mb/s SATA drive or do I
have to buy a 150. I realize if the 300 will work, it will scale itself
down to match the other drive, the only reason I would buy the 300mb/s
drive is for future upgrades.

In case you need to know I'm using the ABIT IC7-MAX3 mother board and
my OS is WinXP Pro.

my final goal is to have 2 drives working as one and if one fails the
other will keep on working.

Thankd for your help,
Izzy

 

[Mike Walsh]

My IDE 80 GB drive just failed :-(, but I do have a WD SATA 120 GB
150mb/s drive . So what I want to do now is buy another SATA drive
and set them up for redundency.

Questions:

1) Do I need to get a drive of the same size?

If you are using RAID 1 (mirror) the physical drives don't have to be the same. The only requirement is the partitions must be the same size. Getting this to work depends of course on your RAID adapter.

2) My mother board only supports SATA transfers of 150mb/s, and my
current SATA drive is 150 mb/s, can I buy a 300 mb/s SATA drive or do I
have to buy a 150. I realize if the 300 will work, it will scale itself
down to match the other drive, the only reason I would buy the 300mb/s
drive is for future upgrades.

A 300 MB/s drive will transfer data at 150 MB/s, which is faster than any disk drive can read.

 

[Andrea Sansottera]

My IDE 80 GB drive just failed :-(, but I do have a WD SATA 120 GB
150mb/s drive . So what I want to do now is buy another SATA drive
and set them up for redundency.

Do you plan to implement software or hardware RAID?

Questions:

1) Do I need to get a drive of the same size?

Software RAID works at the partiton level. This means the mirrored
partitions have to be of the same size, not the hard disks. Hardware RAID is
usually done at the disk level, so the drives must be a matched pair (some
controllers would work anyway, you will see a single drive which size is the
minimum of the two drives' size).

2) My mother board only supports SATA transfers of 150mb/s, and my
current SATA drive is 150 mb/s, can I buy a 300 mb/s SATA drive or do I
have to buy a 150. I realize if the 300 will work, it will scale itself
down to match the other drive, the only reason I would buy the 300mb/s
drive is for future upgrades.

In case you need to know I'm using the ABIT IC7-MAX3 mother board and
my OS is WinXP Pro.

As far as I know, Windows XP do not support software RAID-1. You need
Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 Server for doing that.

 

[Israel Richner]

Do you plan to implement software or hardware RAID?

Hardware Raid1 configuration, using Intel Serial ATA Raid on my ABIT
IC7-MAX3 mother board.

Will I notice a difference in performance?

 

[DaveW]

To set up RAID 1 for redundancy you need to use two drives of identical
size.

 

[Rod Speed]

To set up RAID 1 for redundancy you need to use two drives of identical size.

No you dont.

 

[Andrea Sansottera]

Hardware Raid1 configuration, using Intel Serial ATA Raid on my ABIT
IC7-MAX3 mother board.

Will I notice a difference in performance?

software RAID 1:
- small overhead for CPU(s) (each request has to be performed twice); in
practice, sometime performs better than integrated cheap controllers (some
of them have no hardware implementation but a transparent software
implementation in the device driver...)
- more flexible

hardware RAID 1:
- if properly implemented, almost no overhead for CPU(s))
- less flexible

The first difference is not always true. Sometime, when compared to cheap
RAID controllers, software RAID performs better
(http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9808/980809raid.html). I read that
some cheap RAID controllers cannot be considered hardware RAID since their
are implemented at the device drivers level...

both implementations of RAID 1, in respect to no RAID at all:
- redundancy... which is what you need
- twice the traffic in the SATA bus (with only two drives, no problem
with this fact)
- while reading data, somewhat higher transfer rate (you can read
simultaneously from the two drives)

 

[Andrea Sansottera]

The first difference is not always true. Sometime, when compared to cheap
RAID controllers, software RAID performs better
(http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9808/980809raid.html). I read that
some cheap RAID controllers cannot be considered hardware RAID since their
are implemented at the device drivers level...

I just noticed I wrote this thing twice. Sorry, I didn't read the post
twice.