HD slows down, want to set up raid to compensate

janat08

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My hard drive is having major performance drops (down to 18mb/s) that reflects in gaming. Is it possible to buy another hard drive and put them in raid configuration that would increase read speed also acting as backup. How do I do that, and will the other HD be tied down by the slower HD, or will it compensate for it's performance drops. Also I heard there's RAID 0+1 meaning there're 3 hds how does that work?
 
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My hard drive is having major performance drops (down to 18mb/s) that reflects in gaming. Is it possible to buy another hard drive and put them in raid configuration that would increase read speed also acting as backup. How do I do that, and will the other HD be tied down by the slower HD, or will it compensate for it's performance drops. Also I heard there's RAID 0+1 meaning there're 3 hds how does that work?

18 mb/s is pretty slow. It may be telling you that it is about to fail. Have you run any HDD health diagnostics programs on your slow HDD? Each manufacturer has their own, like Seagate has "SeaTools" http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/ and WD has Data Lifeguard"...
My hard drive is having major performance drops (down to 18mb/s) that reflects in gaming. Is it possible to buy another hard drive and put them in raid configuration that would increase read speed also acting as backup. How do I do that, and will the other HD be tied down by the slower HD, or will it compensate for it's performance drops. Also I heard there's RAID 0+1 meaning there're 3 hds how does that work?

18 mb/s is pretty slow. It may be telling you that it is about to fail. Have you run any HDD health diagnostics programs on your slow HDD? Each manufacturer has their own, like Seagate has "SeaTools" http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/ and WD has Data Lifeguard" http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3

I would test your HDD right away, and do you have it backed up?

Yogi
 
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smitbret

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You must have misread or misinterpreted YOGI's post.

You need to address the issue with the drive. If it's not a bad cable or some kind of driver issue, then the drive is most likely on its way out and will be a doorstop soon.

If your HDD is getting 18mb/s then you've got much bigger problems than RAID will fix. In fact, putting a bad drive in RAID is a recipe for disaster and your issue will probably just be magnified. A poor performing or unstable drive should never be put into a RAID array.
 

popatim

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Putting your drives into a faster raid means raid0. raid 0 means a full reinstall of everything because creating the array will reformat the drives.

Yogi offers sound advice in testing your drive first. Your drive is either extremely full or is showing signs of failure.
 

janat08

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Well I was gona use Raid 1, meaning it acts ad back up. Is Hd tune good for checking health. I think that there's a link i had somewhere that would let me booth from either drive in case of failure.
 

smitbret

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Not necessarily. It sounds like your HDD is on the way out and RAID is never a backup. No matter what RAID you choose, your system will not perform quickly or reliably with a bad HDD. If you are jonesing to buy a new HDD, then do it but use one as a true backup to the other. Back it up now while you still have access to it
 

janat08

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I think that RAID is defined as back up in terms of disk failure, otherwise it's not back cuz it doesn't save from operating system failures or viruses. Well with RAID 1 you should get 200% read speed (which is what im after), but with fuked up HDD it should at least be 100%. What would be ideal for me if i could get something like 150%, so that i could be sure that HDDs aren't bottlenecking me.
 

smitbret

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Well at 18mb/s, you would be looking at a theoretical 101%, that's if you somehow squeezed 100% performance out of the new one.

Did you mean 18MB/s? Even then, that's pretty bad and will drag the entire array down.

Theoretical and real world performance are 2 different situations. I would be surprised if you got the speed of 1 good HDD if you RAID 1 with the bad drive. Most likely, the reads will slow down while the system waits for data to load from the bad HDD or the HDD will just drop out of the array altogether. You can certainly try it, and you may get results you were hoping for, but I wouldn't risk my data.
 

smitbret

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Depending on the actual HDD (Make, Model, Size), 50MB/s is not bad. I am using an older 300GB Seagate and that's about where it runs. If it's a 500GB+ then it's probably still running slow and I would start giving some serious thought to replacing it before catastrophic failure

Keep in mind that even with a RAID 1, if a drive dies during a write, you can lose data.
 

tinmann

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Here is what I use: A 240Gbs Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD 550Mb transfer speed for windows and a Samsung 1Tb HDD where I install all my steam games.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?gclid=CILalb3U47sCFWRk7AodiTMAKA&Item=N82E16820226237&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-Internal+SSDs-_-N82E16820226237&ef_id=UjJsGgAAAec4onEP:20140104041542:s
I have a Corsair Force 3 120Gb that I purchased and had to RMA it. While waiting for it to return I formatted the Samsung HDD and installed Windows on it. That's what made me buy the Mushkin. I just couldn't live with the level of performance the HDD offered vs the SSD and I didn't want to wait thru the RMA process. If you have never tried SSD you should. You'll never want to use a regular HDD again.
 

janat08

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at the moment im like meh, cuz I apparently can't add the HDDs to raid 1, nor can i use any of the extra disks in raid configuration to boot windows from. I also bought 2, so any1 has suggestions?
 

smitbret

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You bought 2 new HDDS and want to use them in RAID 1 to replace the old one?

You'll probably have to create the new array in the motherboard BIOS and then either image the old drive to the new array or just do a fresh install.
 

janat08

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does the image also include windows? how do i use it? I already made an image on the 2nd drive, and i was gona install to the 3rd one, and then pair them up into raid 1. It didn't worth though, basically i put the 2nd drive as a boot device and nothing happened.