Greetings Michael,
Here's a well written and empirical analysis
of RAIDs in various configurations:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200406/20040625TCQ_1.html
This article may answer your question directly.
We recently assigned C: to a single WD 74GB Raptor
on an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, and never looked back.
It works marvelously fast with a 2.8GHz P4 512K L2 cache
and 800MHz FSB (Northwood core).
We got hit pretty hard by a virus last year
on an aging Windows 98/SE machine.
We now depend a LOT on Drive Image 7 to create and
restore "image" files of our C: partition on the
new ASUS motherboard with Windows XP/Pro.
This is the fastest way we know of recovering from
a destructive virus or worm.
This software (now acquired by Symantec and re-named
"GHOST") does not appear to work if C: is on a RAID 0,
however, and that is one of the main reasons why
we did not configure C: on a RAID of any kind.
We did want speed AND reliability for C:,
to accelerate program launch speeds and
minimize headaches.
We're planning right now to build an experimental
machine which will also have a single HD for C:,
plus a RAID 0 with 2 x SATA HDs @ ~40GB each
(80GB total "striped"). We chose a single HD
for C: so we can easily restore C: from an
"image" file written by Drive Image 7.
On our special-purpose RAID 0, we plan to
store ONLY the Internet Explorer cache, and
possibly also the Windows swap file (for now).
This RAID will consist of SATA drives at
either 7200 rpm or 10,000 rpm (e.g. WD Raptors).
Because the IE cache tends to get large,
the more so as we browse the Internet,
Drive Images of C: grow larger accordingly.
By moving the IE cache to different drives,
C: stays quite static.
Moreover, the Windows swap file is volatile and
does not need to be saved between shutdown
and startup. So, it too can be assigned
to such a RAID 0.
And, for our database, we will go with a
single large 300GB PATA Maxtor with 16MB cache
(which we just bought at Office Depot at 50% discount)
and possibly add future SATA drives of similar size.
This machine will plug into a Gigabit LAN, which
also has lots of storage space on the other nodes
for backup purposes, e.g. XCOPY /s/e/v/d (across
the Gigabit switch) of complex folders with 50,000+
discrete files.
Another way of insuring "snappy" program launch
speeds is to make sure you have extra RAM,
which reduces the need for swap file I/O
in the first place.
I hope this helps.
Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
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