Raid

[Lagu]

Hi all watchare

I have told me reseller to put in an extra 80 GB HDD for RAID. I have already Maxtor and he is nit selling this make. He have Seagate Barracuda 80 GB. he said I must have one more Maxtor otherwise it is impossible.

I have read of Pagefile.sys. It says I shall have it on my fastest HDD not among the systemfiles and other stuff.

I was thinking if the other HDD should go a little faster I should put this file on the other more empty HDD.

Is it true I must have 2 identical HDD´s as spin as fast as the orginal HDD?

Lagu :?

[Empty_5oul]

as far as i know you cannot simply "install" or add RAID to a current hardrive. When i was thinking about it on mine i would have to format/reinstall and would lose all stored data.
Possibly this is a consideraition - unless you are thinking in terms of a new mahcine!

i think the two drives used should be identical.
What do you plan to do stripped - for speed OR mirrored - for protecting important data.

[Lagu]

I have read if I have RAID I should get more "power" so to speak. When crunching they should share the data with each other but I perhaps have misunderstand the whole finesses having RAID?

Lagu ;)

[mitro]

To answer a couple questions:

Must you have 2 identical hard drives to use RAID? No. But they should be the same RPM and if they aren't both the same size you will only have 2x the storage space of the smaller drive.

Since we are talking about a performance boost I will assume we are talking about RAID 0 (Since RAID 1 mirrors one hard drive to the other for redundancy).

I've experimented in my one computer running Raid 0 vs. a single drive and while the RAID 0 array is faster in SOME tasks, I feel that the benefit is not worth the risk. With a RAID 0 array you double your chances of failure. One fairly new hard drive will feel as fast as the RAID setup in almost every situation.

Also. it's true that you wouldn't just be able to add another hard drive, the hard drives would have to be reformatted and start from scratch.

[moving fusion]

Lagu

You can do many different things with RAID depending on what you want to achieve.

See this page from whatis.com as it explains the difference between RAID levels. http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,290660,sid5_gci214332,00.html

Also something to look at is Matrix RAID – I run this in my work PC
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm for example the OS partition is RAID 1 while the other partition is RAID 0 for speed.

Pagefile.sys is Microsoft’s virtual memory. This is resizable and can be placed on different drives.

Also something to think about is:
Is you have RAID 1 (mirror) over two 36Gb drives and one fails you can replace it with a bigger drive but the useable space will only be 36Gb, however it must be very similar to the drive its replacing (RPM, cache size and (make/model - maybe).

HTH

Sam