A8N-SLI RAID Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kevin Mayer
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Kevin Mayer

Greetings,

I have two two western digital 10,000 RPM drives in NVIDIA Raid 0
configuration. This makes me a bit nervous as this is my workstation.
I'm thinking RAID 10 may be better. Can I just install new more drives
and have the array rebuilt without destorying my current install?
Suggestions?

Thanks,

Kevin
 
Kevin said:
Greetings,

I have two two western digital 10,000 RPM drives in NVIDIA Raid 0
configuration. This makes me a bit nervous as this is my workstation.
I'm thinking RAID 10 may be better. Can I just install new more drives
and have the array rebuilt without destorying my current install?
Suggestions?
Click to expand...

I think you'll find that the nVidia nForce RAID controller only does
RAID 0 or 1. So if you have the drives on the nForce SATA controller,
RAID 10 is not an option. You might be able to use a 0+1 option, but
you'll need to add two more drives, and I'm unsure if this can be done
from an existing RAID 0 config.

Only the Sil3114 controller also does RAID 5 or 10, and has a 'create
with data copy' option. Whether or not this enables you to create a RAID
10 from an existing RAID 0 config, again I can't tell.
 
Thanks for the info. I can see that you're right, 0+1 is the only option
with NVIDIA. Would you suggest NVIDIA 0+1 or Sil3114 Raid 10 for a good
balance between speed and dependability?

Thank You.
 
Kevin said:
Thanks for the info. I can see that you're right, 0+1 is the only option
with NVIDIA. Would you suggest NVIDIA 0+1 or Sil3114 Raid 10 for a good
balance between speed and dependability?
Click to expand...

Well I'm finding it pretty much impossible to determine what the Sil3114
actually supports, so I will leave that to you.

RAID 0: Full capacity, faster, no tolerance of drive failure

RAID 1: Half capacity, marginally slower, tolerant to 1 drive failure.

RAID 0+1: Half capacity, faster, tolerant to 1 drive failure, or 2 if
you're lucky.

RAID 5: Full capacity - 1 drive, a bit faster than single drives,
tolerant to 1 drive failure

RAID 10: Like 0+1. 0+1 is a mirror of stripes, 10 is a stripe of
mirrors, generally better than 0+1.

RAID 5 is a pretty good trade-off between redundancy and capacity,
Windows XP can do it in software, but I don;t know what the CPU overhead is.

Ben
 
CPU overhead for RAID 5 in XP is "minimal".
Don't forget that with RAID 5, reads are faster, but writes are a lot
slower. However the ratio of writes to reads tends (not always) to be low so
the impact of slow writes is often not too bad.

Hardware RAID controllers are always preferable, however an OS RAID 1 or 5
is better than none.

- Tim
 
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