Raid 0 Questions

[Guest]

Hi, I just wanted to ask those of you who got some drives in raid-0, do you have incredible amount of fragmentation like i do? I'm downloading some movies on kazaa, and since i can't defrag all my free space, (apart from a boot time defrag, but still, it gets back anyway..) the fragmentation keep on coming back at crazy rate.. like i analyzed my raid drive (composed of 3 60 gigs maxtor, and a 50 gigs partition from a 60 gigs maxtor too.. the other 10 is for my os partition..) so anyway, i analyzed it, it said 2 fragmented files with 950 files excess fragments.. and few seconds later, i checked again.. was like 14xx.. so it basically gained 500 fragments for barely a minutes worth of incoming data.. I don't have a t3 by the way, only DSL. I'm putting back in question the idea of having a raid if it's so much a pain to maintain. Cause it's damn fast, but when it's defragged.. once it's fragmented.. it can be damn slow too. Anyway, i started the raid with two drives, started putting data on it, added a third one in it, and then the fourth one (50 gigs partition), could it be because they aren't really filled equally? But why windows allowed me to do it if it was wrong in the first place and cause me troubles.. (i'm using xp btw.. ) so any ideas? I benched my raid drive using sisoft 2002, and i get at the most 23000 something under the filesystem benchmark.. i do 27000 or 28000 with my 10 gigs partition, (all four drives are the same anyway) There seems to be something wrong here.

Thanks in advance.

Pierre-Andre

 

[svol]

Are you using software or hardware RAID. As far as I know it is not possible to just add drives with a RAID 0 hardware array, you will need to rebuild the entire array to do that, but I don't know with software RAID.

My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground .

 

[Guest]

Yeah i'm using software raid using windows xp. But I'm thinking of buying a raid controller instead of my ultra 100tx2, but they are more expensive, so for now and for some times too, i'll be using software raid, but it shouldn't be that bad tho? isn't it?

Thanks for your time!

Pierre-Andre

 

[svol]

Software RAID is not bad, but if you add disks to a already existing array the disks don't contain the same amount of data and will get terrible fragmentet, it is best to rebuild the array so the data get spread out over the disks in the same amounts.

My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground .

 

[Guest]

Ok, that's exactly what I thought.. But still, why windows hadn't warned me about that? Or isn't there some kind of way I can't spread the data equally with a defrag util or some kind of utility like that? Cause how will I move my data temporarily now so i can rebuild the array? I have no clue. So there must be something to do about it?

I'm thinking about it, there must be something to do, cause else how would windows allow differents volumes sizes to be used together? cause eventually, one is going to be full and the other not. So what's up with that ?

Anyway, thanks again!

Pierre-Andre