Raid or not to Raid

  • Thread starter Thread starter Si
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S

Si

I'm thinking of upgrading my homemade pc some more. Someone told me that if
I set up a raid with 2 drives and set it as raid0, it will double the speed
of my hard disk access. I know I run the risk of losing everything if it
goes wrong but my backups are good.
I have three questions...

1) Do you have to have 2 matched disks? I have a 30GB drive now and would
like a lot more space so I was going to buy 2 60GB drives and move a linux
partition on my current drive to it's own drive. If I buy 2 drives it
equals 120GB, I could, for the same money, buy one 180GB drive with slightly
more memory onboard. I think the 60GB drives have 2mb and the larger one
has 4 or 6mb.

2) How much more will it perform, my freind says that it will perform twice
as quick on disk access (makes sense to me). Does this mean that it will
boot up quicker as well?

3) My motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ F9 ), supports raid, can I have 2
drives set up and an IDE as well?

Any other advice would be appreciated as I'm about to spend some hard earned
cash on it.

Thanks
Si
 
I'm thinking of upgrading my homemade pc some more. Someone told me that if
I set up a raid with 2 drives and set it as raid0, it will double the speed
of my hard disk access.
Click to expand...

Access time is unchanged.
I know I run the risk of losing everything if it
goes wrong but my backups are good.
I have three questions...

1) Do you have to have 2 matched disks?
Click to expand...

No, I didn't. If ones 20Gb and the other 30Gb your RAID 0 array will
be 40Gb. 2X the size of the smaller drive, no exceptions.
I have a 30GB drive now and would
like a lot more space so I was going to buy 2 60GB drives and move a linux
partition on my current drive to it's own drive. If I buy 2 drives it
equals 120GB, I could, for the same money, buy one 180GB drive with slightly
more memory onboard. I think the 60GB drives have 2mb and the larger one
has 4 or 6mb.

2) How much more will it perform, my freind says that it will perform twice
as quick on disk access (makes sense to me). Does this mean that it will
boot up quicker as well?
Click to expand...

Boot is a little faster. You only see a difference when moving large
files. Mainly 100Mb and larger. DV editing leaves you with huge files
to delete. just getting rid of the old footage goes way faster with
RAID 0.
Once your in a game there is no dif. Frame rates unchanged. Surfing,
no improvement.
3) My motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ F9 ), supports raid, can I have 2
drives set up and an IDE as well?

Any other advice would be appreciated as I'm about to spend some hard earned
cash on it.

Thanks
Si
Click to expand...
A WD 8Mb cache HDD ran rings around my array so I dismanteled. 2 of
those RAIDed would be awsome.
 
Thanks for the useful advice. I do quite a bit of video editing (working
through old family video tapes etc...), that's one reason why I want more
space. It seems to be 7 to 10 gb just to capture a video, then it writes
almost that again as a temp file during creation!! So it's good to hear
that will help.
I also play Unreal Tournament 2003 a lot lately and that takes ages to fire
up, hopefully that will speed up. I've taken care of the frame rate with a
5200 card from sparkle (good card).

I think I've decided on 2x80GB drives with 8mb cache and IDE130, these are
quite cheap from www.overclockers.co.uk, so I'll give it a few more days for
more feedback and get them for the weekend.

Si
 
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