RAID, controllers

[TheChemist]

Hullo there. I'm looking to get a new hard drive and decided to slap a couple 80GB 8mb cache WD drives together in a RAID 0 array. However, I've got a couple of concerns:

I'm having a rough time finding reviews on cheap (<$50) software RAID cards. Is this because they're not particularly recommendable? Is hardware RAID the only way to go? If not, please tell me about what you bought and how it has treated you...

I read a post earlier that OS's installed on RAID arrays tend to go bad within a few weeks and must be reinstalled; I wasn't able to pull a definitive confirmation/debunking from the responses, so if you could post your experiences, I'd really appreciate it. btw. I'm planning to run win2k/XP pro. Thanks!

 

[aliu42]

I have a Promise TX4000 RAID controller...

It has support for up to 4 drives...all on seperate controllers...

I love it..

It goes for around $120 from Newegg.com..

I've got the same Maxtor Hard Drives your considering hooked up to it..and they rock..

Aliu

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-Albert Einstein
3DMark2001<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6317063" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6317063</A>

 

[david__t]

Hardware RAID is the only way to go and for the small investment, the extra speed, performance and stability is well worth it.

I am running 2 Seagate Barracudas (60GB) using the onboard promise RAID on the Asus A7V333. It runs beautifully but there are some things that you should bear in mind before proceeding:

I think that you will find that people that say that RAID OS installs die after 2 weeks have either not installed the OS / IDE drivers properly or have used incompatible drives. You really do need to use to identical drives if possible - you can get away with different sizes but the main specs (access time, cache etc...) are best to be the same. All Raid manuals will tell you this.

The second thing to bear in mind is that when you come to install your OS, Fdisk will not report your drives partition sizes correctly (if you are going for RAID 0 ie 1 massive partition of both drives) but this is a software fault and does not mean that they have not partitioned properly. I formatted my disks in DOS and it came out with some completely wrong number but that is just the limitation of DOS and Fdisk. Also MAKE SURE that you have your RAID drivers on a disk because Windows XP will need those during the install process.

Speed tip - get smartdrv.exe and load it in DOS before you start an XP install; it wil speed up the process greatly.

Incidentally I am using FAT32 rather than NTFS and it has served me well and I have had no stability problems just in case you wondered.

4.77MHz to 4.0GHz in 10 years. Imagine the space year 2020

 

[TheChemist]

Thanks for all the suggestions David, and for your input, aliu42. I'll be using two absolutely identical drives, so hopefully the OS problem won't be a factor for me. That gives me peace of mind.
As far as hardware RAID goes, I wasn't specific enough. What I really meant is wether I should get a cheaper RAID card of the variety that you (david) have, or the more expensive kind that aliu42 is sporting. The difference is that your RAID controller is actually offloading a good number of calculations on the CPU, whereas aliu42's has all the logic on-board. I'm wondering if having that extra circuitry is really worth ~$100 extra now that processors are into the Ghz range?