Despite the warnings, I tried enabling RAID in BIOS (Intel chipset) and almost fried my Win 7 installation. So, I now believe for myself that the only way to enable RAID is to also reinstall Windows 7.
Does anyone know whether a data partition on the Windows boot drive would be affected?
Are there any clear advantages to RAID in a one-drive system? (I did not see a way to enable NCQ).
RAID really requires more than 1 drive to be truly effective and make true performance gains and to really be considered as
true RAID at all. Most RAID configurations use drives of equal specification however drive size doesn't have to be equal. However the the larger drive extra space will get wasted.
There are plenty of a technical sources for RAID on the WEB that provides some good information about using RAID.
A couple of things...though RAID can be "installed" off the cuff, it is advised that you think things out. One major question you want to ask yourself is whether or not the user(s) will be performing primarily READ actions or WRITE actions. If the RAID type isn't matched to the primary activity that will be performed then the full RAID benefit one would expect won't happen.
For example, if the majority of the activity will be READS then RAID 5 is the usual preferred configuration. However if the primary activity will be WRITES then RAID 1+0 (also called RAID 10) is the usual pick.
Another example is whether your environment is going to be OLTP or OLAP. OLTP involves primarily single row random access READ and WRITES. Whereas OLAP involves voluminous multi-row READS or WRITES access.
Another question to ask is what is more important to you...performance or reliability. A firm understanding in answering these types of questions will provide the direction as to what RAID technology one should choose to use.
To be honest, I have come to the conclusion that these points are the least understood by most folks when configuring RAID. Everyone just seems to go with RAID 5 all the time without giving much thought as to what is the goal to be achieved. There are 5 primary levels of RAID and many more hybrids above that. Each has their strength and each has their weakness. Each has a specific reason to exist for its use. Learn what those reasons are and identify your needs accordingly before doing a RAID configuration.
Also another thing. There is hard RAID which is hardware controlled by way of the controller and there is soft RAID which is operating system driven. From a performance perspective and reliability perspective HARD RAID is preseferred over SOFT RAID. HARD has the best performance as it avoids the usual associated context switching characteristic of an operating system managed RAID...as HARD RAID directly accesses the hardware bus. Also HARD RAID is more reliable than SOFT not bieng prone to process glitches. The single advantage that SOFT RAID has is that it is cheaper to achieve for a home consumer.
On this SOFT v. HARD point, HARD is always the better way to go.
