Slghtly OT; WinXP and RAID 0

[Chet]

I know this is OT but as a very long time lurker I know there's many
very knowledgeable posters that use Acronis or other imaging apps in
this group.

I'm planning on setting up WinXP (slippedstreamed SP3 and RAID drivers)
on two new 320GB SATA drives. I've never used RAID before but know RAID
0 will split the data between the 2 drives, and I presume I'll only see
a C:\ drive in Windows Explorer or Disk Management (both drives
recognized as 1).

The motherboard supports ACHI and RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD.

I presently image (DriveImage XML) the IDE WinXP drive to an external
USB SATA drive for backup, and likewise for the dual boot IDE Win7
drive. I swap in a spare IDE drive occasionally for testing the images,
booting to a rescue CD with BartPE and DriveImage restoring an image to
the spare drive and then booting to it (gives me peace of mind!).

My question is will I be able to image the two new sata drives as C:\ as
I do now? Also, what would be a good procedure for testing the image
besides just browsing through it?

OR, would it be simpler to use RAID 0+1 for the backup/redundancy? The
board does have 4 SATA connectors.

Background: the machine is homemade with an ASRock 775 HDTV motherboard,
4 GB (2x2) DDR2 667 RAM, Intel P4 3.46GHz EE 955 SL94N cpu, 500 watt
power supply; the machine is used mainly for running IIS for my local
intranet workgroup for web development and Microsoft Virtual PC (it even
runs the Vista Business evaluation version pretty well!).

This is a RAID learning exercise for my personal knowledge, so if I foul
it up, I'll just replace the original IDEs with their respective Windows
versions. And probably try again (I'm stubborn).

Thanks in advance for answers and advice.

 

[Leythos]

OR, would it be simpler to use RAID 0+1 for the backup/redundancy? The
board does have 4 SATA connectors.

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP, it's hardware redundancy, not data backup of any
form.

If you want hardware redundancy and you have 4 drive of the same size,
raid 1+0 or 0+1 is the way to go - great speed and depending on which
you choose you could have two drives fail without impact.

A "backup" is to make data safe, RAID does not do that.

With RAID-0, if either drive fails or faults you will lose all date on
both drives.

 

[Chet]

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP, it's hardware redundancy, not data backup of any
form.

If you want hardware redundancy and you have 4 drive of the same size,
raid 1+0 or 0+1 is the way to go - great speed and depending on which
you choose you could have two drives fail without impact.

Murphy's law could be used here, two would impact my setup! The same
drive in each array.

A "backup" is to make data safe, RAID does not do that.

With RAID-0, if either drive fails or faults you will lose all date on
both drives.

I do understand that the RAID setup would not actually be the backup,
that's why I was asking if, in a RAID 0 setup, the two physical drives
would show as a single disk in Disk Management (or Windows Explorer);
and if so, could that "C:\" drive be imaged for the backup?

Thanks for the reply,

 

[Andrew E.]

RAID 0 is usually created for speed,RAID 1,gives more speed than SATA
but 0 has backup ability if one hd is lost.Slipstreaming sounds good but
if the data isnt copied correctly whats the use..For more RAID info,go to:

http://intel.com/performance/desktop/platform_technologies/storage_performance.htm

 

[Leythos]

I do understand that the RAID setup would not actually be the backup,
that's why I was asking if, in a RAID 0 setup, the two physical drives
would show as a single disk in Disk Management (or Windows Explorer);
and if so, could that "C:\" drive be imaged for the backup?

I can't answer your question because it depends on the driver used by
the backup utility.

In cases of the old DOS Ghost program, if you didn't load the RAID
controller driver the array was not even found.

Have you checked the documentation for the software you want to use?

 

[Greg Russell]

With RAID-0, if either drive fails or faults you will lose all date <sic>
on both drives.

RAID 0 is usually created for speed, ... but 0 has backup ability
if one hd is lost.

So who's full of shit here? One of you states that RAID 0 has recovery in
the event of disk failure, the other says the opposite.

Enquiring minds want to know ...

 

[Leythos]

So who's full of shit here? One of you states that RAID 0 has recovery in
the event of disk failure, the other says the opposite.

Enquiring minds want to know ...

RAID-0 is two or more drives with the data striped across the drive, no
redundancy at all.

Why not just google RAID-0 and read the websites that describe how
different levels of RAID work.

RAID-0, two or more drives, if any drive fails it's a total loss.

RAID-1, two or more drives, one drive is a copy of the other, you can
remove either drive and still operate without data loss.

 

[The poster formerly known as 'The Poster Formerly]

So who's full of shit here? One of you states that RAID 0 has recovery in
the event of disk failure, the other says the opposite.

Enquiring minds want to know ...

Andrew E is the Idiot.