to RAID or not to RAID

my little brony

my little brony

Keep Being A Little Bitch
Oct 15, 2004
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upgrading the home PC with an A8N-SLI and since my current main drive (a 40gb Western Digital) will be going into a computer I'm building for the office I'm trying to decide how to set up the storage

break it down:
Maxtor 80gb
Hitachi Deathstar 80gb (has been quite reliable thus far)
Western Digital 160gb
Western Digital 320gb

So I'm thinking of RAIDing the two 80s for faster BF2 load times (that's really the only damn thing I care about these days when it comes to computar power :lol: ), sharing the 320 to Schmilk's XBox for movie and TV rip purposes, and keeping the 160 off to the side for backups and other such shiznit. Schmilk is once again graciously donating a piece of hardware to me, an ATA100 controller card that will run the two large drives while I run the RAID and optical drives off the motherboard.

It's either this or use the 160 as a system drive and the two 80s extra storage. I'm pretty sure this is what I want to do but still...any thoughts?
 
Coqui said:
I just replaced 10 of them within the past month
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d'oh. until last year I'd never had one die on me then the 120 that had ALL of my personal files, pictures, and other such irreplacable items suffered a catastrophic head crash :( it's still sitting off to the side because one of these days when a couple hundred is burning a hole in my pocket I will send it off to DLR to get my stuff back. some of those files were quite important, some of them I want for sheer nostalgia :o

why_ask_why said:
you'll see decent gains with just ata 100 raid but I'd go sata 150 raid
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I only have IDE drives :p Now that I have a motherboard with SATA ports I'll be making future hard drive purchases to match :)
 
i thought of another idea...I could combine that 160 with the 80s for RAID 0+1 but I'm not sure if I need that space for anything else...:confused: hrm
 
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The only "Death Stars" were the 75GXPs, before and since then the IBM/Hitachi family has been fine.

I don't see any real reason for RAID. You're not going to gain all that much speed, and there's the chance of losing everything if both go down. If all you have on there is loseable stuff (Windows and installed programs), then no big deal. And it has the cool factor.
 
Fat Burger said:
The only "Death Stars" were the 75GXPs, before and since then the IBM/Hitachi family has been fine.

I don't see any real reason for RAID. You're not going to gain all that much speed, and there's the chance of losing everything if both go down. If all you have on there is loseable stuff (Windows and installed programs), then no big deal. And it has the cool factor.
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quite the contrary, you gain a considerable amount of speed :wtf:
the last ata raid setup I had was producing scsi numbers
 
fly said:
I would be concerned about running RAID 0 on drives made by different companies with different platters/access times/etc...
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Aye, I forsee bad things if you use it for backup. Really dont gain much time either :eek:
 
I don't think you'd gain all that much from RAIDing all that together. Plus, do you really need all that space for home use? Just split the 160 into an OS partition then do active storage and installation on the rest of it. Backup and longterm storage on the 320.
 
sure do, we have a fat pipe at home and thus at any given time either schmilk or myself is downloading LINUX ISOS from newsgroups at a full MB/sec

The 320 is being used for movies and tv shows, will be shared to the xbox so we can watch whatever I download that Schmilk doesn't get to first. The issues mentioned above about the different HDs on a RAID kinda make me wonder if it's such a good idea...I dunno, I have all week to decide.
 
If the only thing you're looking for from your RAID setup is faster load times, and yes they can be significant, then I would take both of the 80GBs and stripe them.

It takes a bite out of reliability since if EITHER drive goes your data is fucked, so only use that drive for programs that you can easily re-install like games, and maybe your swap file plus other files you wouldn't mind losing in a disaster. If you wanted to you could also install all your games and aps on those two drives and then take an image of it, so if one of the drives goes bad *or* you have problems with some of your software, all you have to do is restore the image and you're golden.
 
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