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Old July 12th 04, 02:51 AM
Will
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(ChrisH) wrote in message . ..
On 11 Jul 2004 09:02:19 -0700,
(Will) wrote:

My own take on this is that using the implemetation of RAID on a
motherboard is not the way to go. I have never used a RAID to boot the
OS - always used a separate IDE drive for that job. In the past I used
a RAID 0 array for two data drives via the onboard Promise chip of a
P4B-E, but the controller chip died within 18 months. To recover the
data on those drives I purchased a PCI Promise card (which also
offered the ability to do RAID 0+1 on 4 drives). The stripe format was
the same as the onboard controller so I recovered my data. With the
IDE card I bought an extra 2 drives and installed a 4-drive RAID 0
array, and within another 12 months 2 of the 4 drives had failed.
Lucky I had a backup of the important data. Remember that the drive
does not need to fail to lose data, screwed-up disk writes can do the
same and it's much more difficult to recover data from a screwed RAID
than from a single drive. This happened to me when the power supply to
one of the drives became intermittant due to a faulty connector. Most
disk utilities cannot cope with damaged array data.

Rather ****ed off with the unreliability I installed 4 larger drives
(160GB) as a 0+1 array. I see no marked increase in speed (there may
be some) but do have the satisfaction of better data security.
Consider though, this extra security has cost me double the price of
the drives - two drives are the striped array but the other two are
invisible and used only for mirroring.

My advice, for what it's worth, is that if you really want to use RAID
then get a decent controller - forget the MB implementation. However,
much depends on how you propose to use your PC. If it doesn't bother
you to lose all the data on the array (perhaps just using it as
temporary work drives for video encoding) then a RAID 0 is fine. If
you need both RAID and security you will want to go RAID 0+1 and
therefore use at least 4 drives. I wouldn't bother with RAID 0 with
only two drives and the array as the boot device.

RAID 1 is just a lazy way to maintain a continuous backup, using Drive
Image or Ghost onto external media would be an acceptable substitute.

ChrisH


Thanks. I may just avoid the on-board RAID alltogether.

Will