Raid question

[Urbwolf]

Ok i just finished building my new system, I7 920, Asus p6t Mobo, corsair 1000w ps, Corsair 6gb tri chan 1600 mhz ram, Dual gtx 285, and one 1tb baracuda HD 32mb chache, So here is my question, They only had HD in stock will be getting another on Wednesday, I installed win 7 on the 1 HD, When i go on wednesday to get the other HD do i need to completely reinstall everything to set them up under raid 0 or will it automatically copy what it needs to to the other drive?

 

[Dwarf]

You will need to reinstall when setting up your RAID0 array.

 

[whs]

Sorry, but such a nice system merits an SSD - 60GB is enough for the system. That is many times faster than a Raid setup and you can use one of the HDDs for imaging the system from the SSD and the other one for data. If you look at one, make sure it has Trim support in the firmware. This together with Win7 would be awsome. Random access on an SSD is typically 4 nanoseconds - on a HDD it is 20 milliseconds - that is 5000 times slower. And a good SSD has a transfer rate of 200+MB/sec.
BTW: Raid0 is not very safe. If one drive goes on the blink, you loose everything.

 

[Urbwolf]

Yea i understand raid 0 I would loose everything, Been using it for years and have experienced it. So if i get a SSD would I still be able to use the baracuda drive for games and such, I mean 60gb really isnt alot of space these days and wouldnt using a HD still slow down my system? Also my HD came with a program to make a exact copy of another HD of same size wouldnt i be able to put new drive in clone the old drive then set them as raid because then there duplicate drives? Also would i really see a considerable, noticeable performance boost by going raid? Was told with the 1 TB drives I wouldnt see a performance boost by going raid, The drive i currently have is Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s


Maybe one of you guys can tell me why my bootup time has increased, My Restart time on old system was 60sec, Had XFX motherboard with Q6600 2.4ghz, 6gb corsair xms2 ram, 2 300gb HD ran in raid 0, 9800gx2 GC

My new system restart time is 105 sec, Why such a increase with a better computer? Is it because of the raid on one comp and single drive on other?

 

[whs]

60GB is plenty for the OS and the programs plus the files that are timing sensitive (which are probably only a few). The performance boost with the SSD should be considerable. I have measured a 10 second boot with an early Win7 version. Even if it were 15 seconds, that would beat any spinning disk. There is no piece(s) of hardware for the equivalent money amount of an SSD that can increase the performance like that. But just to remind you again - Trim support is important to maintain the initial performance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

 

[Urbwolf]

Ok so maybe i will go ssd in the future and i appreciate your input but money wise i can only afford another hd, So back to my original question, Can i just make a clone of original HD then hook up as raid 0?

 

[Urbwolf]

noone can tell me if poss to clone another HD so i can set up raid without reinstalling os

 

[whs]

noone can tell me if poss to clone another HD so i can set up raid without reinstalling os

I did not want to drop this conversation. But to tell you the truth, I don't know the answer to your question. Sorry. Maybe someone else does.

 

[pparks1]

You cannot setup RAID0 without a reinstall as far as I know. Reason being is that 1/2 of the file is typically on 1 drive and the other half on the second drive. So, since you are already fully installed on one drive, it cannot simply split the files in half. You are going to need to reinstall.

 

[Urbwolf]

Do you think I would even notice a difference other then maybe start up time by using raid? And if I do decide to go ahead and reinstall to use raid 0 I hear there is a prob installing win 7 with 2 tb worth of HD space, Is this true?

 

[pparks1]

RAID0 can make a large difference if you do a lot of file manipulation of really large files. Generally speaking, I find that it makes very little actual difference in boot times, game loads or general application use. I've never felt the risks associated with RAID0 are worth it for home users. Today, I'd much more likely recommend a single SSD drive for the OS and apps and 1 large drive for storage space.

 

[whs]

There is a 2TB limit for boot partitions because of the capabilities of the MBR. As far as I know that is a NTFS limitation.

 

[peterseb80]

No, you are likely not going to see any difference at all with raid on a home computer.

 

[whest]

If you use the intel chip the following applies :

It depends whether you enabled raid in the bios before you installed the OS - if you didnt you will have to reinstall the OS - otherwise the PC will blue screen when you try to boot the OS. Unlucky if you didn't enable raid because the below applies.

Intel’s RAID configuration utilities offer the flexibility to upgrade from a single Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive to a two drive RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration when an additional SATA hard drive is added to an existing PC.

Desktop Boards - Troubleshooting Serial ATA / RAID issues

From my experiences using raid and 2 disc's there isnt that much gain in speed you really need for 4 disc's before it fires up. If you could wait till you could afford an SSD at least you would be getting value for money.