RAID 0....JBOD??

[tommyc610]

Hey everyone,

So I built a gaming PC about 2 years ago now and originally installed a WD 250G hard drive. I believe it has an 8 mb cache. Recently I bought a seagate baracuda 500G with 32 MB cache and I want to set up these two drives within my system so that they both appear as C:/. I am not sure if a RAID 0 would be best for my situation as I do not want to let 250 gigs go to waste. Also, I do not really know anything about raid or JBOD so I would appreciate anyone's advice.

If I end up setting up a JBOD, will one HD be filled first completely before the other is put into use? Or will information be stored alternating between the two (not striping). I do not want to have one of the drives filled completely before the other gets any use at all as this will slow down the system all together!!! Thanks for any advice in advance!!!

-Tom

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

btw what your looking to do is setup a spanned volume. JBOD stands for Just a Bunch OF Disk. In JBOD each disk is assigned a drive letter.

I'm rusty on spanned volumes but from what I remember they suffer the same pit falls as raid 0. Should 1 drive fail the array will be useless. But unlike RAID 0 the data will be recoverable by an expert.

 

[4745454b]

Why do you want them both as c? That seems dumb. Just buy the second drive and plug it in. Fill them up however you see fit.

 

[Zenthar]

^+1, just give the new drive a new letter, you will be glad you did when you will re-install your OS and won't know how to backup the 500GB+ of data you have .

 

[JDocs]

Actually filling your OS drive will cause more of a slow down than using the second drive. OS drive needs free space for temp files and so on.

Additionally if you have 2 separate drives you can shift your page file (virtual memory) to the non-OS drive allowing you to in fact gain performance.

 

[average joe]

You probably don't want to do RAID 0 with those two drives. For RAID 0 its good practice to get identical drives with the same capacity, spin rate, and cache size.

You can span two disks in Windows without any software which would make it look to you as if you had one single larger C: drive..

Just use Disk managements to set it up.

JBOD is not a version of RAID it is just a bunch of hard drives connected to a raid capable controller without a raid array configured.


If I end up setting up a JBOD, will one HD be filled first completely before the other is put into use?
This is where the definition of the term JBOD varies from vendor to vendor.

If you just connect the drives and don't span them (each drive has a letter or label in "My Computer") then you will control which drive fills up first by where you choose to save stuff.

If you set up a span (so you only see one drive letter or label in my computer) and you vendor calls a span JBOD instead of the more formal [JBOD with concatenation] then it will fill the two drives up as it see fit. Often filling one drive up completely before using the other.

Alternatively, you could leave 50 gigs or whatever on the drive your worried about out of the span as a buffer and just span the rest. But that would cause you to have 2 drives letters as well.

 

[seboj]

For RAID 0 its good practice to get identical drives with the same capacity, spin rate, and cache size.

Good practice, but not necessary. You will see performance increases using heterogeneous drives. However, it will not be the maximum performance provided by 2+ homogeneous drives.

 

[geofelt]

I think I would just clone the current 250gb OS drive to the new 500gb drive, and just use the 500gb drive for everything. The old 250gb drive could be sold, or used for backups.