Drive Xpert- Raid0?

[sevsman]

Hello again all, i was wondering if anyone had any experience with Asus P5Q series mobos?
I have a P5Q-PRO and currently am installed to a WD 320gig. I want to know it will be any quicker installing to Raid-0 with the WD 320gig and a WD 200gig? Both are sata2. Although i know it will be faster does anyone know of a rough idea of speed increase? (just a guesstimate will do)

And now for the specific P5Q stuff...

This board has a feature called Drive Xpert on it, and although in the manual it states that you can only use the ports for data storage i have seen posts on the net from people that say they have been able to use it as a boot setup, and this is what i would like to try if the speed increase will be noticeable. Only thing is, is that out of all the posts that i've seen with people saying "oh i did it and all was fine" i've never actually seen a post with any tips on how to get this working with regards to making driver disks and formatting ect.

This will also be my first time trying Raid so i want it to go as smooth as possible..

Thanks all



*edit*
I do have a spare pcie 2 port sata card lying around, but it's only sata1. Would this still be faster than 1 drive installed the conventional way if the Drive Xpert thing turns out to be a flop?

 

[Barman58]

Hi Sevsman,

One thing to consider is that If you use a 320 and a 200 you will lose access to the 120GB difference giving a total size of 400gb so you may want to consider a balanced set-up if you are not using existing drives.

The other thing to consider is that using the on-board controller n cause bottlenecks that will negate the speed advantages of the array.

Have a look at the in depth article here which will explain things a little with regards to stripe size etc.

RAID 0: Hype or blessing? (1/9) | Tweakers.net

 

[sevsman]

Cheers mate, i'll read have a shifty over at that link now. And i'm not worried about loosing the extra space as 200GB will be fine as it'll only be the OS on there because all my other files are saved on different drives.
If i do find it to be a good speed increase then i'll get a couple of 320's next weekend. I just didn't want to spend out the cash to find out that the increase was all that much..

Would you advise the pci card then?


*EDIT*

Oh and i should have put in the actual post that it'll be Raid 0. I'm looking for performance in the OS only.

 

[Barman58]

Definitely go for the bespoke card - preferably with it's own processor so as not to load the main processor at all.

Most of my Raid work was a while ago and using Raid 5 for redundancy rather than Raid 0 for speed but with the right set-up and for sequential reads (video editing etc), increases in the order of 40-60% are possible.

Not sure what you'll get with an OS though as this would involve a lot of small reads with a fair amount of head movement.

Have a good read of the info out there and remember the potential downsides too - one drive error can take the whole array down losing all data on both disks.

Oh and make sure you consider backup

 

[sevsman]

Sorry to back over it again. The card is only sata1. Will i get much increase in performance over the single drive or will it be hindered by the fact it's only sata1?

Oh and all i do really is author dvd's and convert/edit films and music, that'll all be running of a different HDD. So will the fact that the OS HDD can read/write faster decrease conversion times? The videos for example will be sitting on a storage drive but the output folder will be on the C: drive..

If it's not really going to make a noticeable difference because of the types of things that i do i'll give it a miss..

Thanks again mate

 

[Barman58]

Hi Sevsman,

It's one of those things that is really dependent so much on exactly what you do with it. in these days of 10000 rpm sataII until you actually try it in your situation you never really know what you'll get. I read reports from users saying that even if it's not quicker it feels better, similar in many ways to the things being said about Seven compared to XP and Vista. I think, personally, that unless you have a specific problem caused by disk transfer Raid 0 is probably a bit specialised.

Of course if you have the hardware available and the time to set things up for a trial, it may work for you, (even using the onboard controller for testing)

 

[sevsman]

Well i decided to leave it alone as it's sods law that something will go wrong, as it always does when i'm involved

I'm looking at either a 70gig SSD or a 160gig velociraptor at the moment, but it'll be a while before a make a decision as work has taken a beating by the crunch.
Thanks for all your help though mate, it's much appreciated