Getting RAID with not all drives master

  • Thread starter Thread starter *Dude*
  • Start date Start date
D

*Dude*

I have a P4PE that I want to get RAID working with my 3 hard drives for RAID
0. But I have parallel ATI and so if I connect the 3 drives as master
(manual says HDs need to be all masters) I can't have any cd-roms because
the cable is too short. How can I get around this? One option is to get a
serial to parallel adapter right? any others?
Also, it says in the manual for RAID 0 to use 2 drives. Can I use 3 drives?
Any performance gains?
 
I'm not familiar with the details of the P4PE, but most mobos in this price
range will only support two drives in RAID0. The HDD's have to be masters
because to get the speed benefit which RAID0 offers, all disks in the
raidset need to read or write at the same time. Master/slave operation
doesn't allow this.

If you need more disks in the array, it may be best to go for a PCI card
which is designed for it, eg. Promise. Also consider configuring it for
RAID5. If you have three disks in a RAID0 array, there is three times the
probability of a failure than if you are not using RAID. It only takes one
disk to lose a few bytes, and you could lose much of your data. RAID5 would
need an extra disk, but may be worth it for security. All disks in the
raidset need to be the same size/speed etc. for it to work well.

Regards

David
 
U can get a sata adapter (about $25 in states) and use this in a 0 array. I
have a parallel 80G WD-jb on the raid controller and an identical one on a
sata controller and it flies compared to a single drive setup.
 
With what I've read about the erratic operation of many SATA adapters,
I wouldn't trust one in a RAID 0 set. I'm sure there some good ones out
there but why not spend a few bucks more and go for a 2nd SATA drive if
you want RAID performance to run those huge programs while your
benchmarking the drives! (snicker)

Rob
 
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