Help me switch to RAID :)

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I'm stuck on an old Dell rig but it does support RAID and I have a pair of 500GB drives. 500 gigs is all the space I need but I'd love more speed!

What RAID mode should I choose (I don't know if the mode is automatic in the BIOS or not...) and will I have to wipe the one drive fulla' stuff and start again from scratch?

Will me using Win7-64

Thanks.

Why do you want RAID?

The first thing to remember is that RAID is not a backup. It's not unusual for people using RAID to lose all their data because they erroneously think that they are a backup.

If you want performance, RAID is not going to help that.

With two drives, about all you can do is either mirroring or striping.

With mirroring, the data is written to both drives. Problems arise when one drive has problems and the mirror is broken and you don't realize it so you do nothing about it. So you're sitting there thinking you are in good shape and then the other drive goes. So much for your data. It's gone.

With striping, the data is split onto both drives for performance reasons. Lose a drive and you lose all your data.

Forget RAID. There are times when it is useful, but that is rare for home users.

Darn... I figured I had the pair of matched drives, using them in some sort of RAID would double the speed. (I don't care about data integrity - I keep a backup elsewhere.)

it will, its the striping he talks about,

furthermore if you know what you are doing the first problem kinda sorts itself.

first off i would suggest you read up on the different types of raid, there relaly is only one that works for your application, raid 0,

unfortunately this also means that losing either of those disks means losing the whole, or at least everything above the block size.
so if you have a regular external backup there shouldnt be a problem,
it will double your read speed, but not your search latency, meaning ti will take it just as long to search the volume for the file before it can start transferring.

the actual method varies a lot depedning on what drivers and raid controller you have, often they are brand specific, that said it should be fairly simple.

you would need to create an external backup and then load it unto the newly formatted radi drive later.

Meaning the data on ONE of the existing 500GB drives will need to be wiped? Create the new RAID-0 array then reinstall Windows and copy my data from the backup drive?

I can do that - it'll be worth it for the speed boost without buying any new equipment.

no,

to create a raid 0 array you need 2 empty disks, to create the array, and a backup for your data.

during boot there should be a prompt for you raid controller, when you use that the two disks can then be linked in raid 0.(please dont start before having read up on it)

in essence a raid disk will chop up a file into a lot of small parts, so part 1 goes to disk 1 part 2 to disk 2 part 3 to d1 and so on.

you can create multiple partitions on that raid 0 drive if you want, in essence after that point windows recognizes the whole array as a single disk.

That's correct about wiping both disks, not just one.

One thing I can't figure out is what kind of processing a home user would normally do that would be able to take enough advantage of disk striping to be worth the effort and greatly reduced reliability.

The main improvement in efficiency from disk striping is, I think, from sequential file processing.

there is a noticable performance increase in transfer speeds but as said the latency remains the same for the disks, so it can improve loading times when loading huge amounts of data and it can improve general file transfer speeds, if you do a lot fo animation where you open and close several large (tens of gb's) files then it certainly does help.

when rendering you often hit a performance cap based on the data output, the hardrive will simply be too slow for the rest to do its job at full power.


as for general performance, i use a 15k hp server disk as my main disk and it really does help a lot, that said no latency issues there so that might be why,
i couldnt find a difference between that and a raid 0 with two of them, but that does equate to having 4 (7.5k) disks striped and not 2(again bar latency), might simply not be able to perceive the difference

A number of years ago, I tried a RAID 0 setup to increase the speed of compiling and linking software. I could see a difference, but it just wasn't worth the effort.

I can see that for doing serious animation work, but I wouldn't expect to see people doing that on an old Dell computer.

Id wipe some things on there.

RAID 0 will increase performance when doing any kind of (reasonably large) file transfer, as the data will be split and written/read from both drives simultaneously. Jobs with small IO (like compiling software), or lots of IO with small files (like anything text-based) won't see as significant a performance increase.

Right.

Except for rather specific forms of processing on the computer, RAID 0 / data striping is far more trouble than it is worth.

Uhh - quite the contrary - for gaming, video streaming, or any type of work that needs large data streaming - RAID 0 will help.

Okay, okay - I won't bother. I'll try and hold out a while longer and just get a nice, big SSD. 256GB drives are *really* coming down in price!

depends on what you do,

but as people here have said it mainly helos on large files, if that fits your usage then you should feel a difference, it can be very easy to setup if your controller was well made, i havent tried raid on dell systems so i dont know (do you have a name for the raid controller?)

I was going to suggest that SSD might be better if reading large files in a hurry is so important, but you beat me to it.

I have to admit that I don't do computer gaming, at least not modern computer gaming. I did play the old Doom years ago but haven't paid much attention to anything since.