Quick IDE RAID question from the uninformed

**Technoid** · 23 March 2001, 06:59

The NON raid HDD goes on the onboard IDE and the two other on the RAID card.

**Gurm** · 23 March 2001, 07:13

Either, really.

But it depends on your IDE RAID controller. If it is the build-in "lite" version which is coming with many motherboards nowadays, then you have no choice but to put the single drive on the other controller.

If, however, it is a full version, there is no reason you can't make a single-drive raid array.

- Gurm

**Technoid** · 23 March 2001, 15:55

The reason i said to put the boot drive in the mainboard's standard port is because of safety.
Correct me if im wrong but you can't take a single drive array and plug it to a standard IDE port and make it work!?!
If the board can play "ULTRA100" standard IDE board then go for it!

If Raid spreads I will someday have a hard time trying to make some "the light's is on but no one is home" user understand that when one of his two (or more) striped raid array hdd's broke his data disapered and that neither I nor anyone else can make it come back!

It's hard enough to explaine why 10 two gig partitions compressed with drivespace on a 20gb HDD is a *bad* thing to have!

The person in mind dident trust FAT32 and wanted to know how to make 64k cluster fat16 partitions, he had a friend that had NT4.

**Paulr** · 23 March 2001, 17:13

I think I'm understanding everything.
I'm quite aware of the implications of running RAID 0, however as all three drives are going to be IBM units I'm not too worried about failure.
So, Disk 1, attached to Primary IDE channel on motherboard (Motherboard will probably be ASUS CUSL2, so ATA-100 there)
Take the next two drives (Going to form the 90GB RAID 0 array).
Attach one to each of the two IDE channels on the RAID controller (I know the Promise is the better card, but those HotRod cards are really nice price)
If the RAID card fails, I only loose the 90GB RAID array.
If one of the two drives in the array fails, I loose all the data.
That sound about right?

**Novdid** · 23 March 2001, 17:30

RAID setups can be picky. I strongly suggest that you go down the Promise path. Those Hotrods are not as stable. The 50$ extra are well worth it.

**SCompRacer** · 24 March 2001, 00:13

Looks like you got a good grasp of it, Paulr. You can always add slave drives if you want RAID 0 + 1.

Some have reported problems in forums with the Highpoint controller though I have been fortunate. One of the complaints was data corruption when copying files from the IDE 3 & 4 RAID to the IDE 1 & 2 channels. This was with onboard RAID on Abit boards.

No performance difference between the two in tests I have performed, but Promise has a better support site if you need it.

I jumper my RAID drives as cable select, seems easier to manage.

------------------
ABIT KT7A, Two RAID 0's * 900MHz Athlon T'bird, 133/33 @ 7.5 for 1000 * 256MB Crucial 7E PC/133 RAM * Four IBM 75GXP's * The Rest

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 24 March 2001).]

**Paulr** · 24 March 2001, 07:45

Maybe we will go down the 'Promise' path then.
It's just the difference in price between £35-£40 & £85-£95, but as this is going to be a server streaming encyrpted video streams across the network, it does need to be reliable.
I've never used 'Cable Select' on HD's (well not in a very long while) was going to have all three drives set as 'Master' as they are all going to be on seperate IDE channels.

**xortam** · 24 March 2001, 08:45

I've never used IDE RAID (or IDE for that matter) but why don't you add that third drive to the RAID 0 array? I know that you get a performance kick adding a third drive in SCSI arrays.

**Paulr** · 24 March 2001, 08:59

That was certainly a possibility.
Could even add it and make it a redundent drive.
The way I saw it was if I had a single drive and then a RAID array of two then I could loose any one part of the system and not loose everything.
I loose one of the RAID drives, I loose the data, but I still have a bootable PC - non of that hassle of re-installing or re-ghosting OS's.
I know once you add a third drive to a SCSI array it makes a difference (I'm used to using 4 drive RAID 5 array's on work servers) but this just needed to be a cheap addition.
Anybody else have any thoughts on how much performance boost you would get from having all 3 drives in the RAID array over just the 2?

**xortam** · 24 March 2001, 09:13

I'm going to be adding a third drive to my SCSI RAID 0 array here soon (after taxes) so I'll be able to run some benchmarks. I believe Adaptec has some benchmarks on their site (SCSI again); not sure the impact of running RAID drives on IDE slaves. I've never lost a drive but I always have backups if I do.

**Paulr** · 24 March 2001, 11:00

Well that was another possible option, 3x 15,000rpm ULTRA160 Drives, but that kind of makes a mockery of the idea of a 'Cheap server to stream video'

**xortam** · 26 March 2001, 08:49

Obviously, you would need to hang all of the drives off of the RAID controller for HW RAID. If your controller only has one IDE channel than presumably it will only support two drives, one on master and one on slave. I thought some of these controllers have numerous master channels but I don't follow IDE HW much.

**Paulr** · 26 March 2001, 16:42

Hopefully somebody will see I've posted a new question to this thread
OK, so lets say we decided to RAID 0 all 3 of the IBM drives.
Gives us 3 points of failure, we know, loose one drive loose everything.
If you were cabling up 3 drives for RAID 0 what would you do?
2 Drives on the first IDE channel of the RAID controller, master/slave or put the two drives on the secondary IDE controller?
Cheers - getting there.

Quick IDE RAID question from the uninformed

Quick IDE RAID question from the uninformed

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