Raid compatability questions

[Guest_imported]

i've never looked into raid before and was wondering if it's possible to dual boot win2k/win98 with a raid array/If it's advisable to do so. building a new comp soon and the extra storage capabilities would be nice. preferrably it would be IDE RAID.

thanks for your time

 

[dakota81]

You can dual boot those two operating systems without a raid system. In fact, a raid system doesn't help or hurt you in getting a dual boot set up. Just install Windows 98, then install Windows 2000 second, I haven't done it in a while, but I know it's very easy to get set up.

As for raid, I am very hesitant in setting up a raid system, because simply put, I don't have the need for the small speed increase you are going to get. On the down side, when you set up a raid system, if one of the harddrives fails, you loose all the information on all the drives you've got hooked up. In my opinion, the risks are far greater than the benifits. It's your call, though.

 

[Guest_imported]

thanks, yeah, dual booting is easy.. doing it right now.. do you know of any places with more info on raid? i'd like to read more on it

 

[cdogg]

Depending on the type of IDE RAID you go with, you may significantly decrease the read speed. You can only increase the write speed.

Let's say you set up a striped array. You'll increase the write speed, but "slightly" decrease the read speed. If you stripe more than 2 HD, then you can significantly increase the write speed. However for each additional HD you add, the read speed goes down.

When you setup a mirrored array, both the read & write speeds decrease. This configuration is mainly just for protection from hard drive failure.

 

[CyberVenom]

I thought striping allowed for faster reads as well as writes. Perhaps slower seeks, but definitely faster sustained transfers.
Mirroring (RAID 1) will protect against the drive failure problem described above, but it will decrease the speed as cdogg said.
Raid 5 (3-Drive Parity) should allow for some increase in sustained transfer speeds while also retaining the ability to recover from the failure of any single drive.
The best RAID controller I have found so far is the FastTrak RAID from Promise. The only drawback I have encountered with their RAID controller is that they have not released open-source drivers for it, so it is only supported on Windows and a few select versions of Linux that they created binaries for.
3Ware has a RAID conrtoller with open source drivers, but doesn't even come close to the kind of fault tolerance and recovery provided by Promise.

 

[cdogg]

Yes, RAID 5 is for the best of both worlds (faster write times with parity). As CyberVenom pointed out, you may get faster sustained transfers of "large files", but unless the read is "sequential", the average speed is almost always slower. If you only plan on using 2 drives in your striped array, then this slight loss will be practically unnoticeable.

In the latest issue of Maximum PC (Jan 2002), they tested different RAID scenarios using 120GB Western Digital 1200BB hard drives. The results proved that for the fastest read speed, the "single" drive setup was the fastest. The fastest write speeds were attained when 4 of these drives were striped.

If you're mainly concerned with opening apps quickly and fast game loads, stick with one drive. If you work with large files, especially multimedia ones, consider striped arrays.