Software raid over IDE & SATA disk

[RabidDog]

Quick question
Has anyone ever tried running software raid 0 over two disks one sata, one ide?
XP sp3, P41 Asus chipset, OS booting off a seperate disk.
Or is this a complete no-go
If anyone can say yes it will work, or no it wont that will save me some time.
I'm just being a Cheapskate and trying to extract a bit of performance from some (slightly) older hardware.
Both disks 300gb and its mainly for Video editing and storing 2-6gb mpeg2 video files. Not expecting any mega speedups.
I might just try it anyway for laffs.
Googled, and no definitive answer, mostly old answers also.

[Nelson37]

I am almost certain this is not possible. Never seen any sort of mobo or controller which would allow this.

For best operation, RAID drives should be identical.

[TBoneit]

I suspect it could be done in a server version of windows, for example Server 2003, with software raid. Hardware raid they need to be on the same controller.

[RabidDog]

Oh yee of little faith! Ye shall be cast down into the dungeon of (LINUX/OSx?).
I have put it in place and it appears to be working nicely.
It does give a boost on large file transfers which is what I hoped for.
Windows will only raid identical sizes, so 18gb is spare on one disk. I'm a happy bunny, I specifically wanted to go for software raid as it allows the raided disks to be used on another system (plus, I'm a cheapskate).
Trouble is, I now want to add a third disk to get even greater capacity/speed.

This is converting blank discs to dynamic, then telling XP PRO SP3 to stripe the two disks.. all done thru computer mgmt..

The jungle of wires in the case is almost unworkable ....

[nic2k4]

It's all fun and games until someone loses a drive in the array, then it's bye bye data (if you can't repair the array). RAID 0 is not recommended for storage, it's great as a temp location for things like video capture.

I used to capture full frame 30 fps video to un-compressed AVI. That required sustained 20 MB/s transfer speed, RAID0 was the only way I could do it, but every now and then the array would lose a drive. Sometimes a reboot would fix it, sometimes I had to repair the array and sometimes I had to rebuild it, then I'd lose the data. I don't use it anymore, the new drives are so much faster they can maintain transfer speeds above 20 MB/s across the entire platter.

I take it you have 3 drives in there now. You can get better performance and security from individual drives simply by partitionning. Also, the performance wouldn't decrease as the drives get full. Keep in mind data is written to a drive from begining to end, the fastest part of a drive is the begining (that's partly why you see a nice speed up after building the RAID, your drives are empty). Then, the best place to archive anything is the end of the drive. Next, the best transfer speed is achieved between 2 hard drives, the slowest is between 2 partitions on the same hard drive (less than half the speed).

For your setup, find what's the maximum size partition you need for video editing; lets take 100 GB. So you would partition both your 300 GB drives for 100 and 200 GB. Now you would have 5 drive letters in Windows. When you edit video, put the source video on one of the 100 GB drives and save the project to the other. The goal is to always read from one drive and write to the other.

If your editing program uses a temp work folder, experiment with putting it on one or the other partition.

Use the 200 GB partitions for "permanent" storage. Using Windows you can combine them into a 400 GB partition, don't use stripe, use combine. This is like JBOD RAID, it's safe the drives can always be read individually.

[Nelson37]

Software RAID? SOFTWARE??? You have got to be kidding me. Been there, done that, good luck to you.