Raid on test rig

[3.0charlie]

I want to try Raid 0 on the test rig that I'm building. I have 5 13gb IDE 5600 RPM Seagates drives available. Could it be possible to "link" twice 2 drives as Raid 1 then "link" both assemblies as a Raid 0?

Would be something like such:



Ideas anyone?

John

[sswilson]

A lot of that will depend on your motherboard, and I've never run raid myself, but my understanding of a 0 + 1 setup is that it is done with several striped drives for speed, and then 1 larger drive for the mirror.

[3.0charlie]

Thanks. I forgot to add that the mobo only supports SATA Raid, but I have bought an IDE Raid controller, which can support Raid 0, 1 and JBOD - upto 4 drives.

Reviewing my drawing, I don't clearly explain what I want. Here's another try:

Link 2 13gb drives for a total of 26gb, times 2.
Then link both assemblies in Raid 0 for performance.

That would be basically twice Raid 0, using 4 drives. Feasible?

John

[francois methot]

Originally Posted by 3.0charlie

Thanks. I forgot to add that the mobo only supports SATA Raid, but I have bought an IDE Raid controller, which can support Raid 0, 1 and JBOD - upto 4 drives.

Reviewing my drawing, I don't clearly explain what I want. Here's another try:

Link 2 13gb drives for a total of 26gb, times 2.
Then link both assemblies in Raid 0 for performance.

That would be basically twice Raid 0, using 4 drives. Feasible?

John

Whit an external drive as back up....and if you could have all 4 in RAID 0..

I did try in the past, the RAID 5 and RAID 1+0 and this is what I got now:

4 disks in RAID 0 + 1 drive back up

You could have an external disk for back up. I use Acronis to back up the complete disk (incremental) every day...take 1 minute.

I did have a virus one day and I restore the complete OS disk in one hour like is was the day before.

Sandra benchmark my RAID 0 at 240 MB/s and 6 ms random access time...

Cheers!

[3.0charlie]

Thanks! I'll research more tonight on the subject matter. It seems that a Raid-0 with 4 HDDs is feasible. The performance increase is not as substantial, but the risk factor increases as much.

I think it's worth the try - anyway this is only a test rig, no data per say will be saved on the HDDs.

John

[ebdoradz]

2 drive in raid 0 give a nice performance increase,
3 drive in raid o perform almost the same has 2 drive
4 drive in raid 0 perfoem a bit better then 2 or 3 drive but the margin is only a few %

the setup you propose is riad 0+1 and it CANT be done by putting 2 drive in raid 1 and 2 other drive in raid 1 and then both array in raid 0

because controller that support only raid 0 or 1 wont allow you to make raid with array

so my guest would be 2 array of 2 disk in raid 0 and a drive for back up

[3.0charlie]

Good to know. So basically, it's this:

2 drives with their own mirrors - Raid-1, combined in a Raid-0.

Is that right?

[3.0charlie]

One last comment / question: I'm pretty sure it's a RAID 0+1 that I want to set-up. But physically, how would that look like? Using the IDE cables, connect 2 drives at the ends of the cables and the 2 mirror at the middle connectors?

Do I have to set the jumpers to Master and Slave?

I just can't seem to find the info on the net.

John

[pscout]

I assume your ide raid card has 2 ide interfaces? Not sure if their will be a preferred config for performance, but the raid software may predetermine it for you.

I always like to set the drives as master and slave just in case csel (cable select) isn't supported by drives/controller and it avoids any confusion if you detatch the drives.

Its also a good idea to label things as well ... the software interface for it (bios and usually some managment software in windows) will list each drive by interface and maybe serial #).

I have never done a raid 0+1, and on my old ide rigs/adapters i only ever used raid 1. In fact on some of the old rigs with bios limits on hdd sizes, i even used these adapters to to support large drives, without raid.

On my current rigs with raid, i am using sata raid with intel matrix storage manager software. Of the 3 rigs with raid atm one is a simple raid 1 on 2 drives, the other 2 are running a raid 5 and a raid 0 volume across 3 drives. One is using ich7r and the other ich8r.

All of my newer 965 based mobo's also have jmicron chips which support raid but i have not heard great things about their. New nvidia chipsets also have it but I don't know much about them.

Raid 0+1 looks like a great idea for your 4 5400 rpm drives to get some performance improvement.

Doing shutdowns with it is important or you will find they are doing rebuilds a lot to resnyc the mirrors and this might reduce the performance advantage of raid 0 while the rebuilds are underway.

[3.0charlie]

Yup, card has 2 IDE connectors. So I'll connect the drives as Masters and Slaves, using the IDE cables.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your last sentence.

John