Which HDD - speed essential...

[zoey]

Originally posted by Mubbers
I'll take the old drives out and compare -

The thing about the dual boot is that as far as I understand XP won't allow a second OS if it was installed 1st. This discussion occurred here a while back and never seemed to be resolved even with PM 7 (which I have)...

If anyone has learnt otherwise let me know!

I installed winxp after win 98 with part magic7

Win 98 clean
Win 98
Win Me Games
Win XP clean
Win XP

2 Max 40 gig HHD

My xp is at the front of the drive. That is where I was told to put them. also mine are FAT 32

 

[Doctor Who]

taurus - Your descritpion of RAID 0 is slightly wrong, you've got it mixed up with RAID 1, I've got a stripe array, which is for performance and speed, RAID 1 is for mirroring as you described RAID 0.

 

[Mubbers]

What stripes like the Timelords scarf?

Can you expand a little more on the principles of this stripey array? More importantly if this is the way to go where do I get one / it / them from.

I don't fancy running stripes or mirrors past PC World!

Cpt. Mubbers

 

[Doctor Who]

Stripes, it something to do with the packet sizes of the data thats being thrown arround the array, it has nothing to do with my Scarf thank you very much, I'm rather proud of that, it's the only thing in the TARDIS that works properly . I've got mine set to 16k as that appears to be the optimal setting for my hard drives.

You can set them higher, say 32 64 and so on, but I find any higher than 16 and my drives really aren't happy. Below 16 and performance iver y irratic, but I'm not really clear on all the technicallities, so perhaps someone else can give a better discription??

 

[Zedric]

Here are a few illustrations of RAID 0 and RAID 1. The numbers are block numbers.

RAID 0 - Stripe:
======================
Disk 1		Disk 2
------		------
|  1 |		|  2 |
|  3 |		|  4 |
|  5 |		|  6 |
|  7 |		|  8 |
|  9 |		| 10 |
| 11 |		| 12 |
| 13 |		| 14 |
| 15 |		| 16 |
------		------

RAID 1 - Mirror:
======================
Disk 1		Disk 2
------		------
|  1 |		|  1 |
|  2 |		|  2 |
|  3 |		|  3 |
|  4 |		|  4 |
|  5 |		|  5 |
|  6 |		|  6 |
|  7 |		|  7 |
|  8 |		|  8 |
------		------

Doctor Who: The block sizes affect the performance but has little to do with RAID. Bigger block size will give better performance on bigger files (less reads per file). Smaller block size will give better performance on small files (less useless read per file) plus better space utilization (a block cannot contain more than one file). Blocks are normally called clusters.

 

[Mubbers]

I'm begining to get to grips with this now.

If I'm at work and want to speed up access to shed loads of XLS and WORD docs of upto (say 400kb) then I want blocks of how big?

If I'm at play and want to access my big RTCW / MOHAA files I want blocks of how big?

If I want to set this up when I go home what do I need...

Two Identical HDDs of the spec's outlined above.
A RAID controller (can this handle 1 & 0?)
Software?

etc...

Thank's again for the info.

 

[Zedric]

I usually just go with standard block size. Optimized for normal average use. If you want speed, you go with RAID 0. A warning though! RAID 0 is considered very unsafe and is not to be used for any important data whatsoever. A failure in either disk, the RAID controller or BIOS will make the stripe come crashing down with now way of return. If you want safety, use RAID 1.

I personally don't use RAID at all since the extra speed of RAID 0 does is not worth the extra risk. Some people on this forum have different oppinions on this, but this is mine.

If you want RAID anyway, just get a RAID controller card (some motherboards have one built-in). They can at least handle RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 (a mirrored stripe, four disks). Once the array is set up in the BIOS of the controller card you won't need to do anything special. Except if you want to install XP on the array, then you'll need extra drivers for the installation. Drivers for the card may be needed in any case. After this just partition and format the array as a normal disk.

Another usefull RAID type is RAID 5. It's usefull in servers mostly. It requires at least three disks and is as safe as RAID 1, but wastes less space ((n-1)/n at n disks). RAID 5 however require more complex and expensive controller cards.

Damn that got long.