First I would like to ask if you are able to run 2 sets of raid? I Have a A8N32-SLI deluxe motherboard, and am wanting to run 2 74gb raptors in one raid. This one I was thinking of running raid 0. These 2 drives will be the OS and games. Then I want to run 2 250 gb western digital hard drives in another raid set up for storage. What raid should I run this one? I am new to raid but have been building and fixing computers for years. Thank you for the ideas!

Why would you want the 2-250 WD in a RAID? If you want them just for storage, just leave them as 2 drives. The only reason you need a RAID is speed (RAID 0) or redundancy (RAID 1). IMO, you should never use a raid controller for disk spanning or JBOD.

SO I will only raid the 2 raptors in a RAID 0 set up for speed?

The other nice benefit of raid 0 on a windows machine is that the two drives are treated as a single drive. Is there another way to get this behavior on windows without using raid?

Raid 0 link

Advantage is speed and it's treated as a single large drive, disadvantage is if either drive fails the whole thing fails.

That's what I was talking about before - disk spanning or JBOD



Personally, I would rather leave the volumes separate so I know what's on one disk and what's on the other.

Wikipedia for RAID - A good read, if not a little technical...

The first question should be why do you want to run any RAID? If you aren't doing it for data protection, but are just hoping to gain speed, I hope you have a good backup strategy in place. As was already mentioned, if a drive in a Raid 0 array fails, you just lost everything on the array. If you don't need ~150GB for your OS and games, I would probably run your Raptors in RAID 1 to give you some fault tolerance. Should one of those drives fail, you wouldn't have to reload your system from scratch. Keep in mind though that RAID doesn't mean you don't have to backup your system.

Specifically regarding the ability to run multiple RAID arrays in one machine, that is strictly driven by your controller.

True. I would assume his mobo is like mine. I have both a FasTrak SATA Raid controller and a Promise IDE RAID controller on the motherboard.

And of course you have to have a backup strategy in place, that's clear. Maybe you have a 0+1 controller? That offers the speed of RAID 0 and add a third drive for a backup.

I personally run a SATA RAID 0, and I find it to be very nice. IIRC it has a sustained write of somewhere in the 95mbps range. Could be wrong though, it was about a year ago that I benched it.

RAID 0+1 requires a four drives IIRC.

Ahh, indeed.

if it requires 4 drives then should I run the two raptors as the 0 and the Western digital 250's as the 1's? Therefor giving me the RAID 0 + 1?

No, that isn't how RAID 0+1 works. You have a single RAID array defined, that is both striped (RAID 0) across two drives, which are then mirrored (RAID 1) across the other two drives.

there's always the option of RAID5, redundancy at a lower cost.

by cost, i meant the # of hdds, not the $$$.

//krunk (^_^x)

Yeah, you really don't want to make these 4 into a RAID 5.

Here's what I would do:
-Make the raptors a RAID 0
-Leave the other 2 just as regular drives
-Back up the RAID onto one of those drives every week.

If it were my system, I would deviate a little from NARC's config. I would put the two Raptors in a RAID 1 to give you a single 74GB system partition with some fault tolerance, and then leave the 2x250GB as individual drives for data and apps.

No way, RAW SPEED BABY!

Heh - if you had to provide technical support to MY father, you would go with fault tolerance over speed any day.

HAHA I thank everyone for there thoughts and I will run the two rators in a raid 0 configuration and leave the other two just as drives. Again thank you to all!

I win!! WOOO HOO!!!!

Oh, make sure you disable your second RAID chip via your BIOS then. It makes startup much faster.

Within my BIOS the only raid is the Silicon Image mode I am able to chose SATA2 mode, RAID mode, or disable.
There is nothing else in all the the selections that says RAID on it.

Gotcha, well you should be good then.

While I just found that second one. Should I have the nVidia one control the raid and leave the silicon images control the SATAII or does it not matter? So I do have two raid controllers one is the silicon image the other is the nVidia.

Do you know what the boot order is for those controllers? I would think that the nVidia is first, with the SI second.

There are benchmarks out there that compare RAID controllers, but if I were you, I would just use the nVidia one, and disable the SI one (unless you need to reconfigure that for your other IDE drives).

I would think that the mobo allows either controller to be boot controller. All my motherboard with multiple raid controllers on board allow it.

I second the motion to go with the nVidia controller.

True, but during the BIOS bootup, they come in a different order, at least on my Asus mobo. It's not a big deal, but it saves me ~10 seconds at bootup to have my drives on the Highpoint controller rather than the Promise.

The Nvidia is within the BIOS. While the SI I have to hit F4 or ctrl + S to enter that raid after bios check. So they are at two different ends of the startup.

I have a Gigabyte P4 socket 478 board where I can change the boot order of all 3 on-boad raid controllers. I will have to check my MSI AMD socket 939 board when I get home. Maybe this differs between BIOS and mobo manufacturer.