WHICH DRIVE TO USE FOR SOFTWARE RAID?

[Stevie G]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me which drive i should use to bootup into Win XP.
Should i use the 36GB 15K MAXTOR OR 136GB 10K SEAGATE to load windows onto.

I have a scsi bay that can take up to 5 drives.
I have a 136gig Seagate 10K, 2x 36gig 15K Maxtors and a 36gig 10K Hitachi drive.
I also have a PCI ADAPTEC SCSI CARD 29160 ULTRA160 SCSI CONTROLLER that connects to a 68pin cable onto the bay with all the drives slotted in.

What is the best possible way for me to connect them all up to get the best performance out of the drives.
My machine is a Geforce 64bit 6100 mboard with a 3800+ single core cpu with 1gig ram.

Any view will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[Drake2007]

raid 0, 1, 3, or 5?
what's your meaning of best performance, redundancy or speed. Can't truly be both with software raid.
I can't really make sense of your strategy of using scsi so what is it you're actually trying to achieve?

 

[Stevie G]

Im referring to maximum speed.
fastest speed as in everything

 

[gregmcc]

If you want best performance - stay away from software raid.

How much data do you need to store. I would just create multiple logical drives.

You can't do raid5 - your one disk is 136 and the others 36. Raid 0 is also out.

If you do anything else and you loose a drive you loose everything.

 

[Stevie G]

whats wrong with software raid.

what do you mean exactly by creating logical drives?
how do i go about in doing that

i don't have hardware raid so my best bet is software raid as i cannot do a raid o as bootup which can only be done in hardware raid.

will use the 15K maxtor 36gig to load xp on and use the other drives as dynamic disks and do raid 0 on them

i think its the best option

 

[ToxicBunny]

software raid will be slower than native disk access...

If you're looking for performance stay away from software raid.

 

[Conradl]

Software RAID is useless for a performance increase - rather just balance the load manually by installing the OS on one disk, page file on another disk and apps on a third disk....

Edit: Are the disks Ultra320 or 160, cause the card could be limiting the throughput?

 

[Stevie G]

The 136gig 10K,2x maxtor 15K 36gigs are ultra 320 and the ibm and hitachi 36gigs are ultra 160.

the controller card is ultra 160. when i go into the scsi controller utility it only picks the drives up as 40 Sync and not 160, WHY?

I was thinking of using the 1x 15K maxtor to load xp on and use the other 36gig 15K maxtor to store the page file [Please explain how to store the page file on the other disk].Then use the 136 10K Seagate to store all my program files on.
I dont now what to do with the other 2x 36gig ultra 160 10K drives?Any ideas?

1)why doesit only show 40 sync and not 160?
2)setup to do yay or nay?

 

[ToxicBunny]

You can load whatever you want on the different drives.. just avoid software raid if you want performance...

as for the syncing issue, there are a variety of issues that could cause that really...

 

[Stevie G]

does it mean if it picks up 40 Sync that it will affect the speed of the 15K drive with xp on. what mb/s is a normal 7200 rpm disk and that of a scsi drive running at 10K and 15K. But does the Sync play an actual role in the speed?

 

[Drake2007]

Speeding up performance, shove in another 1GB Ram.

As for the drive configurations, it's not going to make much difference. From what I can
gather you have a mixture of 4 x 36GB drives and 1 x 136GB.

Put one of those 36GB drives away in a safe, Raid 5 the other 3 drives and you'll have 72GB total of redundancy for whatever data you feel is necessary not to easily lose. For simplicity point your My-Documents shortcut to a folder on that drive array. When a drive bricks itself you have the spare in the safe to recover from & gives you time to source another.

XP on the 136GB and other easily replaced program installs etc. Don't play with the pagefile. Maybe partition the 136GB if you're planning on dualbooting linux.

As for the sync and termination issues, not meaning to be nasty but rtfm.