Going to Raid 0

[llamedos]

I am going to go to a Raid 0 setup and i am wondering if anyone has any advice.

I have read my motherboard manual and am pretty sure i know what to do, and would like to know if there is anything i should look out for.

my specs are/will be:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4G CPU

Asus P5W-DH-Deluxe Motherboard

Geil 2G DDR2 800Mhz Ultra KIT

Asus 256M 7900GS PCIe Video Card

Tagan Dual Engine 800W P/S

2 x WD 320G Hardrives (Exactly the same)

[ctjoyce]

Get an external 250GB drive. If one of those two drives has a bad sector, or fails, or your RAID controller  dies on you, all your information is gone, and since its spreading it across two drives as one big drive, it is unlikely that you are ever going to get any of that data back. So other than making frequent backups, have fun.

Cheers
Cameron

[Keep It Simple]

I'm presently running RAID 0 in two sys using WD raptors.
These are very dependable drives so, I haven't had any problems.

However, when I build my new VISTA/DX10 sys, I probably wont run a RAID 0 set up
as there really isn't that much of a speed improvement (with todays faster drives) to make it worth while IMO.

Bottom line, if you must run RAID 0, make shure you use dependable drives.

[justpassingthrough]

This is SPAM since I posted it in another thread but it applies here too:

Here is the deal with hard drives.. the faster the rotation, larger the cache and lower access time spec numbers (all combined) the faster the drive + the size of the drive creates the geometry that allows even better real world performance. Larger capacity is better and the less data on it, the faster it is accessed. That is why NickN posted keeping a drive at (or less) than 50% full maintains the best performance of that drive when properly defragmentent.

In other words, a SATA 150Mb/s WD RAPTOR @ 10,000RPM and 150GB+, will wipe the pants off the one posted above or any SATA 300Mb/s drive on the market.

RAID: this is also known as: A Poor Man's SCSI Drive. (SCSI systems being the fastest)

[llamedos]

Thanks for the info guys, it is appreciated.  

Cameron, I will definitely have a backup on another drive. Also i will have as little as possible on the RAID drives just games and other essentials, I'll use the third drive for storage.

I am going to raid 0 because of advice from FSGS.

P.S. can anyone recommend any good freeware backup software?

Thanks

Martin

[Politically Incorrect]

I run a RAID 0 on all my machines even non-gaming. Gaming rig has 2 10K Raptors and the performance increase is most obvious
Back up only what is needed but after over a year never once had any drive failures and am not worried about one.

Something you will need to remember is to setup a Hardware RAID not software and also if you ever get a boot problem (after changing hardware, disconnecting power completely or other maintenance) chances are RAID is disabled in BIOS. That was one thing that stumped me when I first started using RAID, so any boot errors or "can't find drive" messages that is where it is the BIOS settings.  

[ctjoyce]

If you buy a Western Digital Mybook, a stripped down version of nortin ghost comes on it preinstalled.

Cheers
Cameron

[congo]

I just do a straight copy of my data to the backup drive, it can be tedious though.

My Raid 0 is my working drive with windows installed onto 64kb clusters using a modified XP install disk with pre-SP2 drivers replacing the SP2 drivers that will not allow you to install SP2 or above OS's onto anything other than 4kb clusters,....... in other words, if you want Windows on the RAID array using large, speed efficient clusters, (Most effective speed array using folders and no partitions) you will need to build a custom install disk using nlite or some other slipstreaming tool.