Raid 0 Questions

[Hatman]

Ok.

1. If I have 2x 160gb drives in Raid0 and a 400gb drive. Everything is installed on the raid0 drives. If I load up windows w/e and go into my comptuter, can I copy all those files fover to the extra 400gb hard drive?

2. If so, does that mean I can manually back up data on them, and if the raid0 array fails and I make another, I can simply copy it back on? Well I doubt windows would work but the extra data should still work, right?

Thanks for your time.

 

[Hawkeye22]

An array shows up as a single drive under windows. You can copy to/from it just like you can with any other drive. If a single drive in a RAID 0 fails, you lose everything on it. You can rebuild the array and copy data back to it. If windows is installed on the array then it will need reinstalled unless you have an image of the OS drive that you can restore.

 

[mbs49]

As hawkeye said, it will show up as one drive. Raid 0 is simple striping and gives slightly increased IO performance but does nothing for data redundancy. A good practice is to have the OS and apps on your Raid and all of your data on the other drive. That way if a drive in the Raid fails, your data is safe. Only thing you lose in this scenario is your time in reinstalling the OS and your apps. Of course to be safer yet, it is also a good idea to backup your data drive to an external drive using some backup software.

 

[Hatman]

Thanksyou.


Can someone explain to me what this stripesize or stripewidth is, and what making it bigger/smaller does in terms of performance.

 

[sturm]

Stripesize is how much data is written to each drive. Say you have a 128k stripesize. a file that is 60k will be written to one drive only. A file of say 512k will have 128k written to one drive, 128k to the second drive, 128k to the first drive and the last 128k to the second: put in laymans terms, may not be exact but its close.

A larger stripe size can increase read speed for large files as more data will come in one large chunk. The drives wont have to move the heads as much to retrieve the rest of the data. But more files will fall under the stripe size and only get written to one drive.

 

[Hatman]

That to me translates as low is better, thanks.