Client RAID suggestions

[Geates]

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, I could not find a generic RAID forum.

I have a ASUS mobo with 6xSATA II port capable of RAID 0, 1, 1+0. I want to apply a RAID to 3x Western Digital 7200RPM 250GB SATA drives. This is what I'd like to do

       -----------------------------------
DISK 0 |  System  |     Data Strip       |
       -----------------------------------

       -----------------------------------
DISK 1 |  Mirror  |     Data Strip       |
       -----------------------------------

       -----------------------------------
DISK 2 |  Mirror  |     Data Parity      |
       -----------------------------------

I don't believe I can do this with my current hardware capablities, but I can do it using Windows RAID and dynamic disks.

Is this design overkill? What kind of performance hit can I expect having the a portion of the Data volume on the same disk as the System?

-Geates

 

[technome]

Your code box is not quite right...
You can not stripe data (raid adapter level or OS level) from a raid array (in this case the mirrored disks), to a non raid drive (system disk 0). If you were required to setup disk 0 as a raid 0, it is a misnomer, it is still a stand alone drive.
Secondly there is no parity in a raid 1 mirror or a raid 10, the other raid types use parity.
Thirdly with raid 1, "striping" means little, as data is written to one disk, then to the other disk; reads are read from one disk of a mirrored pair, unlike raid 10 which allows reads from all the disks.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from Dynamic disks other then for a simple raid 1.


........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[cpjust]

I have an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe motherboard and I have 2 RAID-5 volumes. A 66GB volume for my OS and 865GB volume for my data. I started with a RAID 0 volume for my OS, but after having a drive die, I didn't want to go though that kind of hassle again, so I made it all RAID 5.
Here are my speed tests for No RAID, RAID 0, 1 & 5:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1458877&page=1

I'd recommend enabling Volume Write-Back Cache on the OS volume, but not the Data volume.

Mine is basically like this:

       -----------------------------------
DISK 0 |  OS RAID 5  |    Data RAID 5    |
       -----------------------------------

       -----------------------------------
DISK 1 |  OS RAID 5  |    Data RAID 5    |
       -----------------------------------

       -----------------------------------
DISK 2 |  OS RAID 5  |    Data RAID 5    |
       -----------------------------------