Building a striped array w/o re-installing windows7

[rnewton8]

I have a 500GB Sata 3.0 Hard drive from Hitachi lying around collecting dust.

What would the performace increase be if I changed my setup to include this drive as a Raid Striped array.. My pc is mainly used for gaming and is a low/midrange setup about a year old.

My PC is an Asus CM 1630 with a ATi 5570 video card.

Also, how much work would be invloved to do this? I dont really want to have to re-install the OS and all my programs etc, so is there any way around this? If not, if the performance increase in say, load times in games like Elder Scrolls skyrim is a lot better than it might be worth it to me.

Thanks for input..

 

[mavroxur]

You won't be able to directly migrate from a single disk to RAID 0 without either A) installing the RAID drivers in the OS, then making an image of the drive, then building the array and restoring the image, or B) building the array, and reloading the operating system.


Some things to keep in mind with striped arrays -


1) The drives need to be IDENTICAL. If you're striping two drives, they must match exactly.

2) Striped arrays do not provide any redundancy in the event of a hardware failure. If one drive dies, you lose all the data on the array.



Striping two mechanical hard drives won't double your read/writes (because of controller and array overhead) but it will be a very substantial increase.

 

[rnewton8]

Thanks for the reply... Can u clarify what you mean by identical? do they have to be the same exact drives with the same model number or do they just have to have the same or similiar specs.. spin speed transfer rates and storage space..

 

[Dereck47]

1) The drives need to be IDENTICAL. If you're striping two drives, they must match exactly.

Sorry, that’s incorrect.

You can stripe any type drives, but your performance will be based upon the drive with the smallest capacity (and performance).

You can stripe a 50GB & a 100GB drive, but your array will be only 100GB (50GB times 2).
You can stripe a 50GB, 100GB & 1TB drive, but your array will be only 150GB (50GB times 3).

If you were dumb enough you could stripe a 60GB HDD and a 60GB SSD also.
Your array size would be 120GB but your Read/Write performance would be the same as if you had 2 HDDs.

Ideally you want the drives in your array to be the same size with the same specs for maximum performance.

 

[DelroyMonjo]

I wouldn't even consider RAID 0 unless I had a 3rd drive for backup.
Unless you want to spend hours reinstalling everything after a RAID failure.

 

[mavroxur]

Sorry, that’s incorrect.

You can stripe any type drives, but your performance will be based upon the drive with the smallest capacity (and performance).

You can stripe a 50GB & a 100GB drive, but your array will be only 100GB (50GB times 2).
You can stripe a 50GB, 100GB & 1TB drive, but your array will be only 150GB (50GB times 3).

If you were dumb enough you could stripe a 60GB HDD and a 60GB SSD also.
Your array size would be 120GB but your Read/Write performance would be the same as if you had 2 HDDs.

Ideally you want the drives in your array to be the same size with the same specs for maximum performance.

I said they need to be, I didn't say it was mandatory. You can mirror and stripe dissimilar drives, you're just limited to the size of the smallest drive, and the speed of the slowest drive. I tend to not recommend things in the forums that "kinda sorta" work. If someone's radiator hose on their car blew, i'd say you need to get an exact replacement, not "get any high temp hose with the same diameter, and use hoseclamps".

 

[rnewton8]

Gotcha....thank you for the replies. I think Im just gonna sell my spare drive and put the cash towards a quad core amd processor like a 955.. currently im running a xII 920 dual core. should see a big improvement i think across the board if i upgrade that puppy. plus it will be easy upgrade compared to having to re-install OS and all my programs on a striped array.