Setting up Raid 0, need some advice.

[godbeer]

Hi Everyone,

I'm badly in need of more storage space for my computer, so I'm going to be buying some new/larger Sata Hard drives. My PC is a Gateway 832gm - P4 630 processor @ 3ghz with Hyper-Threading, 800 mgz FSB, 2mb l2 cache, 2gb Ram (upgraded from 1gb). Currently I have the WD 250gb (8mb cache) sata drive that came with the pc, and a 300gb Maxtor Maxline III (16mb cache) that I added afterwards.

The sata connectors I'm currently using are integrated into the motherboard and are not raid capable as far as I can tell. What I want to do is get 2 400gb Hard drives and a pci raid card and set up them up in a raid 0 configuration, and leave my current hard drives connected to the motherboard sata connectors and use them as backup drives.

I guess my first question would be can I do this (have the raid 0 setup through the Pci card, and my old hard drives connected to the motherboard (non-raid) without any problems or conflicts?

Also, I've narrowed my choice of hard drives down to two WD drives:

#1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144423

and

#2: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144424

At first glance, Drive #2 looks like the clear winner, and is only $16 more. But I've done some searching and read through reviews, threads, forums, etc. and found no one who has one of these set up in a raid 0 configuration - only Raid 1. Any opinion on which would be the best drive to go with? Since I'm not a gamer, I don't really need a Raid 0 setup, but since I'm getting the extra storage anyway I figure why not. Right now I'm in the middle of backing up the important titles in my Dvd collection, and after that I'm going to move into vhs>dvd conversion and archiving home videos (mini-dv), so I'll be doing a lot of multimedia capturing, conversion, editing, authoring, creating menus, etc., so I figure the speed boost will help there. It should also help with programs I'm currently using like DvdShrink, DvdRebuilder, etc.

So, really what I need is just advice on which drives you guys would recommend - I'm flexible on the manufacturer, I just narrowed it down to the Western Digital Drives because I've alway used them and have had no problems, plus they are quiet (I have relegated the Current Maxtor I have to my secondary drive, even though it is larger and faster with the 16mb cache, just because it is so loud). Not only is the sound annoying, but it gives me an uneasy feeling about the drive to hear it grinding/crunching away so loudly when performing any kind of HD intensive activity.

Also, I have no clue what pci raid card to purchase. I guess I just need something basic, reliable and not too expensive. The cards I looked at ranged from $30 to several hundred dollars - I was just going to get the highest rated card in the $100 and below range, but I wasn't sure if there were some features on the more expensive cards that I needed or that would make enough difference in performance to justify the extra cost.

Any Help/Info/Recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Roy

[rallynavvie]

If all you need is more storage space why are you striping them?

[godbeer]

If all you need is more storage space why are you striping them?

Well, I'm mostly getting the drives for more storage, but I would also like the faster speed that Raid offers, so I figure I would set them up that way. I will be using the new drives as my boot/main drive(s). I don't know much about Raid, but from the research I have done, I thought that setting them up in Raid 0 increases performance (one drive reads, while the other writes), and Raid 1 is for increasing data protection in case of failure (if one drive fails, your data is still secure on the other drive). I may have this backwards or wrong altogether

What I want to do is set up the drives in the raid configuration that offers the greates increase in speed (0 or 1?) - I will backup my most important data to my current drives, so my data will still be safe if one of the raid drives fail.

In a nutshell, I want to set them up in the fastest possible way, since I run a lot of programs (video conversion, analysis, shrinking, etc.) where the speed boost will be a real help.

Thanks,

Roy

[rallynavvie]

Unless you're running it as a database or streaming media server I doubt you're going to notice much, if any, speed difference. Even then your bottleneck is going to be the rest of your system, not the drives. You're better off using them seperately and thus not risking 800GB of data getting flushed should a stripe go bad. Regardless of how you back it up that's still a pain in the ass to re-image and restore all that data.

What, specifically, will you be doing with it? I can probably add some of your tasks to my upcoming myth-debunking "real-world" benchmarking RAID 0 later this week. See the following thread:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=284980

If you're still interested in doing it I'd very much recommend just getting a couple smaller drives, like two 80GB ones, to install your OS and applications on in addition to any speed-critical data you need to run (which would be moved to a storage drive once completed). And if you get a RAID controller that supports striping with parity you can at least cut down on the chances of your volume going bad.

The only RAID 0 array I use on my rig is two 36GB U320 15krpm drives (on seperate channels on the HBA) for scratch space only. Assembling video the source is read from other, single drives and written to that scratch drive until I move it off to storage or a project folder. There's really nothing on that drive otherwise.

[redwudz]

I wouldn't recommend RAID0 for a boot drive. One disk fails and the whole thing is lost. RAID arrays also crash occasionally, but you can reset them.

If you want that much storage, get the two drives like you planned and a RAID PCI card. If you don't like the RAID setup, you can use the RAID card to operate the two drives separately. That's what I do with my RAID card. I have a lot less problems that way than I did when I had it set up as RAID0. And like rallynavvie said, I doubt you will see much improvement in actual transfer speed with RAID. Two SATA 150 drives should transfer faster than your system can use anyway.

And with video, you have consider defragging occasional. Separate drives make this easier.

EDIT: If you can find a decently priced SATAII PCI controller, there are a lot of SATAII drives out there. They increase the speed to 300, twice the speed of SATAI.
I use 4 drives, all SATA; Boot, Edit, Archive and Backup. I have two RAID controllers to do this. Both are used independently, no RAID arrays.