tomw

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I'm new to RAID 1. My client wants RAID 1 for Drive C: (Win XP Pro) made up of 2 identical 250 Gig Seagate HDDs. My first attempt was on an ASUS Modo using VIA RAID 1. Every few days the system would drop to a crawl and take nearly 15 mins to boot and about 5 minutes to open MS Excel. It would improve dramatically if I synchronized the drives. And so it would carry on, slow, fast, slow, fast. Remember I've never set up or used RAID before.

No knowing what the problem was or how to solve it, I changed the Mobo for an NForce. After backing up the data I elected to delete all data and reset the MBR. The installation is now complete, backups are reinstalled and all appears to be o.k.

Can anyone tell me if a). the above problem will re-occour with the NForce Mobo, b). what should I have done to prevent the slowing down, c). is there anything I still need to do.

Thanks,
Tom.
 

SomeJoe7777

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On board RAID is notorious for problems like this. The issue was most likely a driver or hardware problem with the old motherboard. There's probably nothing you could have done differently.

Just for portability's sake, you may want to investigate a 3rd-party RAID card that can be moved. That way if the motherboard again has some (unrelated) problem, you can move the RAID card to a new motherboard without losing data and without having to set up the RAID again.

This is less important with RAID 1, since each drive of a RAID 1 (on most RAID cards) can be used individually on a regular disk controller. Still, I like the portability, performance (cache), and driver maturity that a 3rd-party RAID card gives.
 

tomw

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Jun 3, 2008
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Thank You SomeJoe7777, at least I now know a little bit of what to expect. The system has been running with the replacement mobo since the original post and "No complaints" yet. Thanks.