RAID 1 performance

[gobeavers]

I am in the process of setting up a computer with RAID 1. Currently it has 2 optical drives on one channel, and two 250 GB WD HDD's on the other in RAID 1. I did this because the cables wouldn't reach from a CD drive to a HDD in the case (sad excuse, I know). Does having 2 drives in RAID 1 on the same channel hurt performance? If it does, I may just try to find a different solution..

"Go forward until the last round is fired and the last drop of gas is expended...then go forward on foot!" -Patton

 

[RichPLS]

No, it doesn't hurt performance, it will only use half of the two drives space, for it mirrors the first drive on to the second.
So writes will take a fraction of a second longer, not real world noticable, and reads are slightly faster, not real world noticable.
Essentially, there is no gain or loss, just data security in the event of a failure, you will still have data.

_____________________________________________
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[jim552]

Having both drives share the same IDE cable really doesn't have any significant performance hit under normal operations when the drives are mirrored.

That being said there will indeed be some discrepencies depending upon motherboards, drivers, cards installed, cards used, possibly interference from certain applications etc.

In my case, I set out to determine how much fighting for bandwidth existed on mirrored hard drives on the same IDE channel versus being on separate channels.

Nothing significant.

I checked, and I checked, and the applications that I ran on Windows 2000 Server didn't suffer any noticeable amount because of two drives on one channel.

Asus Motherboards with builtin RAID, and Seagate 7200 RPM hard drives.

 

[gobeavers]

ok, thanks for the help!

"Go forward until the last round is fired and the last drop of gas is expended...then go forward on foot!" -Patton