If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
A8V Deluxe - To Raid or not to Raid, that is the question
Current setup:
A8V Deluxe with Athlon 63FX-35 1Gb DDR 400mhz 2 x 200 Gb SATA Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 in Raid 0 (Performance) XP Home Primary usage of machine: Photo imaging etc in Photoshop CS Web design - Macromedia suite Listening to my MP3 music whilst working machine also used in minor area for Words etc... It is a stand alone not networked.. Questions: 1) Am I wasting resources by using Raid 0 for my needs - would it be better to sacrifice file transfer speed for the security of Raid 1 instead? 2) Is it possible to run 3 internal 200Gb; 2 as Raid 0 and one drive as the mirror in Raid 1, or must I have 4 drives for that setup? 3) I have done a huge amount of clearing out of old files and would normally defrag my drive - this is my first experience with Raid and am not sure if a Raid Pair can be defragged in the normal way or not. Is it OK to use the MS defrag that comes with XP Home? 4) Noting the primary use of the machine, should I abandon Raid all together and reconfigure the two Raid 0 drives as, say C & D? If 4 above is the recommended option, to avoid the daunting task of reinstalling large selection of software and data, would it be possible to 'Ghost' the image of the existing drive pair to the external 120gb drive whilst reconfiguring and then 'Ghost' it back on to one of the (now separate) volumes. IE: SATA Drives = 200Gb with 46Gb progs, OS & data Ghosted on to a 120b usb external (I have Norton Ghost 9 but not taken it out of box yet - scared stiff to install it incase I cock it all up again - I tried to install GoBack but discovered that GoBack doesn't with Raid! Hence treading carefully this time around!) Any help suggestions or advice will be very welcome. Thanks -- Donald Gray Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map! www.odcombe.demon.co.uk You do not have to email me, but if you wish to... Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first Thanks |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
Thus spake Donald Gray:
Current setup: A8V Deluxe with Athlon 63FX-35 1Gb DDR 400mhz 2 x 200 Gb SATA Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 in Raid 0 (Performance) XP Home Primary usage of machine: Photo imaging etc in Photoshop CS Web design - Macromedia suite Listening to my MP3 music whilst working machine also used in minor area for Words etc... It is a stand alone not networked.. Questions: 1) Am I wasting resources by using Raid 0 for my needs - would it be better to sacrifice file transfer speed for the security of Raid 1 instead? 2) Is it possible to run 3 internal 200Gb; 2 as Raid 0 and one drive as the mirror in Raid 1, or must I have 4 drives for that setup? 3) I have done a huge amount of clearing out of old files and would normally defrag my drive - this is my first experience with Raid and am not sure if a Raid Pair can be defragged in the normal way or not. Is it OK to use the MS defrag that comes with XP Home? 4) Noting the primary use of the machine, should I abandon Raid all together and reconfigure the two Raid 0 drives as, say C & D? If 4 above is the recommended option, to avoid the daunting task of reinstalling large selection of software and data, would it be possible to 'Ghost' the image of the existing drive pair to the external 120gb drive whilst reconfiguring and then 'Ghost' it back on to one of the (now separate) volumes. IE: SATA Drives = 200Gb with 46Gb progs, OS & data Ghosted on to a 120b usb external (I have Norton Ghost 9 but not taken it out of box yet - scared stiff to install it incase I cock it all up again - I tried to install GoBack but discovered that GoBack doesn't with Raid! Hence treading carefully this time around!) Any help suggestions or advice will be very welcome. Thanks IMO RAID 0 or 1 is overhyped for a standalone PC. RAID 0 will give you greater STR at the expense of latency but is good for any regular large file manipulation where RAID 1 gives you data availability which is great if running a database server for twice the cost of storage space. I'm happy to use 2 identical SATA discs off a RAID controller in non-RAID mode with my page file on the 2nd disc in its own dedicated partition. I use DI2002 for imaging & would consider True Image next time. If your imaging exercise fails, you could resort to doing a repair install. I'd go with 4. I presume Ghost can be run from either floppies or the CD without installing it. More on RAID 0: http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms...art=6&range=10 -- Thank people in advance? Thanking or cursing them afterwards at least gives some feedback! |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
|
#4
|
|||
|
|||
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 22:19:35 -0000, "Paul Busby"
wrote: [] Any help suggestions or advice will be very welcome. Thanks IMO RAID 0 or 1 is overhyped for a standalone PC. RAID 0 will give you greater STR at the expense of latency but is good for any regular large file manipulation where RAID 1 gives you data availability which is great if running a database server for twice the cost of storage space. I'm happy to use 2 identical SATA discs off a RAID controller in non-RAID mode with my page file on the 2nd disc in its own dedicated partition. I use DI2002 for imaging & would consider True Image next time. If your imaging exercise fails, you could resort to doing a repair install. I'd go with 4. I presume Ghost can be run from either floppies or the CD without installing it. More on RAID 0: http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms...art=6&range=10 Thanks for the comments Paul and for the link. 'Tis a steep learning curve... -- Donald Gray Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map! www.odcombe.demon.co.uk You do not have to email me, but if you wish to... Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first Thanks |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 16:56:08 -0600, Wayne Fulton
wrote: [] I bought Ghost 9, but have not installed it. Instead I use Ghost 2003 that came with 9, because I can boot on the Ghost CD and it can handle the Promise RAID, no problem. I use 2003 so I dont have to depend on the Windows installation being there before I can run restore. Ghost 2003 works fine with the RAID and NTFS, and boots fast from CD. I dont think Ghost 2002 works with Raid or NTFS, but 2003 is great. I have not used the VIA Raid to know about it? You cannot of course restore a non-raid image onto raid drives, because that image wont contain the Raid drivers, so no point of trying to boot from it, it cant. But otherwise, no issue. I did fear RAID would be an issue for Ghost, but was pleasantly surprised to discover the AV8 Promise Raid is NOT any issue for Ghost 2003. The only "issue" I saw is that I put system disks as RAID on the Promise controller, and put the one backup disk on the VIA controller. I backup frequently to it, with the idea that everything doesnt fail at once. The VIA controller wants to be disk One, but there is a BIOS setting to switch the order, to be able to boot from the other disk, which is my system disks. This switch works fine normally, but if you might boot the XP floppy, like to install on another partition, or install XP64, etc, it doesnt see this BIOS swap. It still sees all drives (after F6 to load RAID from floppy), but sees a different drive order. Then I worry if installing onto G: will then work as F:? Dunno, so I just unplug power on the backup drive and reboot, and then no issue. However that means I have to reconnect and then go back into the BIOS and reverse order again at completion. This maybe only happens a couple of times in my life, but a minor nuisance anyway, extra steps. Thank you for the effort put into the reply Wayne - given me much food for thought. You have given me son encouragement to dig deeper into this. Even though I have a 64 bit processor, I don't want to try beta stuff just yet - not until I feel comfortable with messing with raid. With my primary usage being photo manipulation with Photoshop CS, would I notice much difference in timing if I either change to raid 1 or even change to non raid config and have 2 separate 200Gb drives "C & D"? Many regards... -- Donald Gray Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map! www.odcombe.demon.co.uk You do not have to email me, but if you wish to... Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first Thanks |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
|
#7
|
|||
|
|||
On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 21:06:24 -0600, Wayne Fulton
wrote: [] My Raid was easy to install, but I really miss being able to boot on a floppy and use a small text editor to fix things. [] Really appreciate the time you have taken with the response again Wayne. More food for thought... I guess, when you boil it all down, my main concern is data loss. In raid 0, two drives halves the MTBF and one failure all data is lost. Hence my backup worries Raid 1 cures that but at the cost of both drives being constantly under stress. No raid and 'Ghosting' the image seems to answer that and with Norton Ghost 9, it would appear incremental backup is possible - (I Need to read the Manual more closely for that!) Thanks again for your efforts Wayne. -- Donald Gray Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map! www.odcombe.demon.co.uk You do not have to email me, but if you wish to... Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first Thanks |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
|
#9
|
|||
|
|||
Donald Gray wrote:
Current setup: A8V Deluxe with Athlon 63FX-35 1Gb DDR 400mhz 2 x 200 Gb SATA Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 in Raid 0 (Performance) XP Home Primary usage of machine: Photo imaging etc in Photoshop CS Web design - Macromedia suite Listening to my MP3 music whilst working machine also used in minor area for Words etc... It is a stand alone not networked.. Questions: 1) Am I wasting resources by using Raid 0 for my needs - would it be better to sacrifice file transfer speed for the security of Raid 1 instead? You'd be better off just using the two disks seperately. If you have any massive multi layer images, you would probably appreciate having the photoshop scratchdisk on another drive, as well as your windows swapfile. I doubt you need RAID1 if you do backups of whats important (and we all do that, right?)... 2) Is it possible to run 3 internal 200Gb; 2 as Raid 0 and one drive as the mirror in Raid 1, or must I have 4 drives for that setup? No, you'd need 4 drives, but thats where RAID5 comes in... With RAID 5, you essentially have 1 drive performaing the redundancy and the others for space. 3) I have done a huge amount of clearing out of old files and would normally defrag my drive - this is my first experience with Raid and am not sure if a Raid Pair can be defragged in the normal way or not. Is it OK to use the MS defrag that comes with XP Home? Good point. I dunno. I highly suspect that it would be fine to use that defrag - the RAID controller should sort out any of the issues. Basically the beginning of the RAID partition is the beginning of both drives, interleaved. 4) Noting the primary use of the machine, should I abandon Raid all together and reconfigure the two Raid 0 drives as, say C & D? That would be my guess. With RAID 0 you lose some flexibilty and increase the risk of data loss (all data is lost if one drive fails), without significantly increasing... well, anything. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 (link of the day) RAID 0 only really seems to gain you IOs per second, but you are not really going to exhibit that pattern of usage. If 4 above is the recommended option, to avoid the daunting task of reinstalling large selection of software and data, would it be possible to 'Ghost' the image of the existing drive pair to the external 120gb drive whilst reconfiguring and then 'Ghost' it back on to one of the (now separate) volumes. IE: SATA Drives = 200Gb with 46Gb progs, OS & data Ghosted on to a 120b usb external Should be fine. But hopefully this is covered in the other replies as I;ve never tried it. Ben -- A7N8X FAQ: www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html Questions by email will likely be ignored, please use the newsgroups. I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String... |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
Ben Pope wrote:
That would be my guess. With RAID 0 you lose some flexibilty and increase the risk of data loss (all data is lost if one drive fails), without significantly increasing... well, anything. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 Perhaps a different set of tests were required: http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/515/1 Maybe it IS worth it. Ben -- A7N8X FAQ: www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html Questions by email will likely be ignored, please use the newsgroups. I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String... |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
IDE RAID | Ted Dawson | Asus Motherboards | 29 | September 21st 04 03:39 AM |
RAID Array "Off Line" on P4C800-E Deluxe | macleme | Asus Motherboards | 4 | September 1st 04 07:22 PM |
P4P800DLX from non-raid to raid | Splitskull | Asus Motherboards | 2 | June 2nd 04 10:51 AM |
P4C800 Deluxe Raid Controller Question | Vincent Poy | Asus Motherboards | 1 | July 24th 03 12:31 AM |
With P4C800 Deluxe I don't need to add Ata Driver System? | Fogar | Asus Motherboards | 7 | June 27th 03 11:22 PM |