Breaking a JBOD on a 680i

[hesskia]

Everyone,
I've been having some issues with my PC lately--they seem to be stemming from a power issue.

My current setup is as follows:
EVGA 680i (TR revision--I know, It can't OC quad cores)
E4300 OC'd to 3.0ghz (9x333mhz, idle temp 29°C, Load 49°C)
4x1GB OCZ Platnium DDR2 800mhz (Dual Channel 667mhz, relaxed timings)
PNY GeForce 8800GTS 320 (580/950)
2 x 320GB Seagate SATA HDDs (In JBOD on the motherboard NVRAID)
2 x 80GB Western Digitial IDE drives in a RAID 0 on a Rosewill RAID PCI card
20X DVD+/-R Burner
4x DVD-R burner
Avermedia AverTV Combo PCI-E TV Card
Raidmax 580watt PSU
Antec 900 Case

Recently, according to speedfan at least, my +12v is at 10.03v (and never fluctuates). I cannot get into the BIOS to check manually due the revision of the bios. I have tried upgrading in the past but lose functionality on my PCI raid card. I have contacted EVGA for help and got nothing useful from them. It seems to be a loading conflict, when i update my bios, my PCI card's bios gets loaded last and doesnt work. When i use the orignal bios, the raild card loads first and i can access my array.

Nevertheless, i'm determined to fix this problem. My computer has become unstable over the last 2 months or so and i'm backing into the PSU but dunno want to spend the 100-150 dollars until i can be sure that is the issue (although, it woudlnt' help to get rid of hte generic PSU). I"m looking to pull my PCI raid card (and IDE hard drives) from the setup alltogether. I'm also goign to pull my older 4x DVD-R burner as well. my problem lies is that i have nearly 600GB worth of data on my JBOD array and i do not want to lose it. I could burn it all to discs, but that is time consuming if i can avoid it.

Is it possible to break an NVRAID JBOD and retain all the data or do i need to back it all up before i break it?

my goal here is to break my JBOD and split teh 320GB drives up. I will pull out whatever redundent hardware i have and start with a fresh install of XP (or Vista) to determine if that 'fixes' my stability issues. Once i remove the PCI raid/IDE drives i will update to the newest bios revision of my MB. If i'm still having the issues (low PSU voltages), i'll replce the supply

i'll take all the leftovers and build some sort of closet server as well.

 

[UncleDave]

Is it possible to break an NVRAID JBOD and retain all the data or do i need to back it all up before i break it?

I don't know for sure but I doubt it. I'd back it up either way.

UD.

 

[arson94]

Just out of curiosity, why didn't you just RAID-0 or RAID-1 your Seagates instead of JBOD? Now between RAID-0 or JBOD, it doesn't matter with your issue because you can't break the array anyway. RAID-1 is mirrored and you could have broke the array and everything would be on either drive. But with JBOD or RAID-0, you'll need to back it up to another drive before breaking the array. Do you really have 600GB worth of data on the seagates? If you do, I'd ask a friend/s for enough drives to back all your data up lol... or, if you don't really have 600GB, see if it'll fit on any of the emtpy space on your WD RAID-0.

 

[hesskia]

Arson: I had my 320's in a RAID0 array, along with my 80's in a RAID0 array. It made for fast unzipping of files between drives, but i coudl not download many files simulataneiously onto the Raid0 array, it became very fragmented, very quickly. On top of that, i lost a decent amount of file space to the block size and the above issues with fragmentation.

 

[Hovaucf]

Well if you were having that sort of problem in RAID then your stripe size was too large for whatever type of files you were transferring.

Reduce your stripe size to something smaller than the files you're transferring and you will have no wasted space. JBOD has little to no benefit over RAID 0 other than that you can use a mix of completely different drives w/o losing capacity.

Of course as mentioned above you should always backup anyways, RAID or JBODs are not backup solutions they're volume solutions.

 

[arson94]

Yea, Hovaucf found a much more concise way to say what I wanted to say in my previous post lol... RAID-0 and JBOD are volume solutions anyways. RAID-1, RAID-10, and RAID-5 are good compromises to the volume solution vs. backup solution. Of course RAID-1 and RAID-10 are huge space wasters as it cuts your usuable space in half. And I agree with the stripe size comment as well. I think the largest stripe size my nvraid would let me choose was 64k, which is way too big. I usually chose 1k or 4k. It may make writing files take a second longer, and maybe cause fragmentation at a slightly faster rate, but you'll save alot of space and that alone outweighs the cons I think.

 

[warezme]

My two cents..., unless you are raiding very high performance drives for a specialty need, than don't. Leave Raid alone. I used to raid until I got tired of the whole mess. I have had the 680i SLI mobo (Raid disabled) and now the 780i SLI (Raid disabled). Just get you a couple of big fat robust HD for storage, keep them defragged and maybe one fast system drive to keep your system peformance up to snuff.