I have a RAID 0 Question?

[rickpcnerd]

well, im planning of purchasing two Identical 320 GB hard drives and set them in Raid 0... I want to know if the computer is going to read both hard drives as a single 320 GB hard drive, or 640 GB hard drive. (320x2=640). Thanks

 

[mad-dog]

well, im planning of purchasing two Identical 320 GB hard drives and set them in Raid 0... I want to know if the computer is going to read both hard drives as a single 320 GB hard drive, or 640 GB hard drive. (320x2=640). Thanks

None of the above, RAID0 plays out as 2x320GB HDD's in a "striped" array.

 

[ethel]

well, im planning of purchasing two Identical 320 GB hard drives and set them in Raid 0... I want to know if the computer is going to read both hard drives as a single 320 GB hard drive, or 640 GB hard drive. (320x2=640). Thanks

It will show about 600MB in Windows.

 

[EchoMan]

~640GB obviously :?

 

[jitpublisher]

The Raid 0 striped set will show up in windows as 1 drive with about 580-600 meg of harddrive space.

 

[ParadigmSys]

Yup, about 600 MB after a NTFS fomatting in XP with 2 320 HDD's.
I use 2 250's in RAID 0 and it only shows 434 after format, not 500 as one would think.

Side note, it will only show 300 if you run in RAID 1 (mirror) even though you still used 2 320;s in there. That is more for data safety than performance thoughput in RAID 0.

Also, check if using a newer serial HDD that the SATA II (3.0g) feature is enabled in both your controller and the drives.

I used a new mainboard that supported RAID and serial II, however the drives initially were set to SATA 1 feature. I had to use floppy that came with the drives to enable the SATA II in the drives- Now were smokin'

I use mine for digital video and gaming and it's great!

Have a great holiday!

Del ;-)

 

[ethel]

~640GB obviously :?

What do you mean - 640MB is enough for anyone's uses - who on earth could need any more than that

 

[ethel]

Just for clarity the reason that you will see less space in Windows is that 1GB is actually measured differently by hard disk manufacturers and OS's.

For hard disks, 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
For OS, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes

So a 320GB drive will show:

320 * 1,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 298 GB in Windows.

If you give a flying f**k about this, go here for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

It's a pretty strange state of affairs, but hey that's what makes life interesting eh?

 

[visuaware]

Side note, it will only show 300 if you run in RAID 1 (mirror) even though you still used 2 320;s in there. That is more for data safety than performance thoughput in RAID 0.

Dont RAID 1 give more performance than RAID 0?

i mean RAID 0 is just stripe and difference data on the disks, RAID 1 mirror, it can read from 2 disks at same time, so should the read-rate not be alot higher too as the disks can then provide data faster looking at the interfaces for drives is normaly way faster than the disks?

 

[i8blarg]

i'm sure this is probably a dumb question, but i dont know anything about raid. i have to harddrives setup right now on my dell 8100. i dont think they're in a raid setup. if i wanted to set them up in raid, would i have to reformat both drives or could i just change the configuration?

 

[glockman]

i'm sure this is probably a dumb question, but i dont know anything about raid. i have to harddrives setup right now on my dell 8100. i dont think they're in a raid setup. if i wanted to set them up in raid, would i have to reformat both drives or could i just change the configuration?

Yes, you must re-format to change from single drives to any RAID.
You could use Norton Ghost to image the drive and then set it up as RAID and restore from your image.

*There might be some RAID 1 cards that support adding a second drive and mirroring from the 1st W/O formatting.