Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Waffle on December 02, 2004, 09:43:41 PM
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Alright - gone and done it and started my winter computer project, which includes new video card, new ram (had old slow stuff in) and going to a raid array.
I've got a nice stash of hardrives here:
4 - 80gb SATA western digital WD800
1 - 80gb IDE Western Digital WD800
2 - 40GBMaxtor IDE drives
I've got a 500watt power supply - so not too worried about that.
What I'm trying to figue out is how the heck to array these. Honestly, I'm just looking at using the WD800s.
I was looking into the manuals and how to set-up the arrays from my mobo manufacturer (gigabyte k8ns pro) There's 4 sata connection off the mobo, using a "gigaraid" driver as well as the Sil32r? - anyhoo..
What would be the easist way to do this? any recomendations?
I've pretty much settled on doing a striped array... just kinda at a loss on where to start. All my important data is on my backup firewire drive.. and getting ready to do the clean sweep....lmao.
Get in the game - trial by fire!
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http://members.shaw.ca/xtremecomputing/RAID.htm this might help
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another good one http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/mb/abit/kx7-333/raid-cont.htm
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oy - more confusion now,
I read there that they said I should leave the boot drive alone and stripe data disk -and left a question about the paging file - does that reside on the boot drive?
So with that that leaves me
Drive c: IDE 80 GB wd800 with XP on it - C drive - unless I partition it
Drives D and E would be the SATA 80 GB drives in a Raid 0 (2x80gb HDDs per drive)
Would that be a wise set up? Machine is primarily used for A/V stuff and gaming now..lol
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Pagefile will be on your c: drive.
You can move it to the stripe set once created.
Its accessable from -
Right click 'My computer', select 'Properties'
Choose 'Advanced' tab.
Pick 'Performance Options' button.
Choose 'Change' under the Virtual Drive heading
Pick drive ( D: or E: ), set Initial/Max sizes to the same (approx 1.5x your memory)
Click 'Set'
Reboot.
Remember - RAID 0 = you lose 1 drive in array, you lose everything on the array, no redundancy.
If you need redundancy use 2 RAID 0 arrays (2x 2x80GB SATA) and mirror the arrays (RAID 1) that way you have RAID 0+1. You can lose any 2 drives and still have intact data. Drawback is your available storage will only be 160Gb.
Writes are slower than RAID 0 alone, but reads are good as it can read from 4 drives.
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well "got 'er done" least for now.
I'm going to go ahead and keep Xp on the single IDE 80GB drive - use that for OS and any microsoft office crap, ect...
Then I'll have 2 80gb drives for data and games, and work programs.
I just finished up one drive which has a bunch of picture and audio data on it. Holy *** - is it fast now - pulled up something like 50 thunbnails like it was nothing...wow!
Waiting on some sata cables till I can set the other 2 drives up....