BF2S Forums My HDs and Raid 0

If they are the same drive, you can run RAID_0. You have to have motherboard drivers for RAID_0 support, so before wiping your drives, make sure your motherboard can support RAID_0.
Setting them up will be easy, just make a floppy of your RAID drivers on a floppy or CD, and press F6 at the beginning of installing Windows.

BTW, there are major differences between RAID_0 and just one hard drive. Boot up times, load times, seek times... Everything on windows seems to run faster.
If you've got the money, I'd suggest a pair of Western Digital 2500KS. You can find them around $80 each, and they make a nice, cheap RAID_0 array. If you've got some dough to spend on a RAID_0 array, I'd suggest the two WD 5000KS at $165 each for a large, fast RAID array, or a pair of the WD RaptorX 150GB drives at $245 each, for great performance.

And if you don't have a floppy drive?

i dont think he wants to go and wast money on a floppy drive that he will only use once. Y do mobos still need them barley any new comps have them any more.

Borrow a friend's floppy,

I myself would buy one, cuz any comp nerd needs one for their.... stuff


Anywho, I have 2 raptors in the RAID that does not mirror, so is that Raid 1? If you RAID the one that mirrors the drives identically, you could potentially have serious file errors, it's a problem I had and I switched my RAID... And Raid setup is f8, not f6.


Gonna restart ym comp now to see my raid setup, been awhile.

Well, looks like I have to get a floppy drive out of the old closet... I swore that I would never use that thing again, but alast, I have to. It feels like I'm putting a 5.25" floppy drive into the comp...

It's the price you pay to put two 150GB WD RaptorXs into "AID0".

Last edited by {M5}Sniper3 (2006-11-19 21:45:19)

Executiator wrote:

And I have mine in a RAID STRIPING...

That's pretty much an oxymoron.

Executiator wrote:

{M5}Sniper3 wrote:

Executiator wrote:

And I have mine in a RAID STRIPING...

That's pretty much an oxymoron.

Listen you...

Just cuz I don't like to type out everything or forget words sometimes doesn't mean you...


ehh fuck it, yes it does.

Now just think about it. What does RAID stand for? It stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks. Now RAID striping is an oxymoron because there is no redundancy. So it should be called AID striping or AID 0.

You have to do a little bit of homework.
RAID_0 is a striped array, 2 or more drives writing segments of sequential data. Sniper3 is right in a way, RAID_0 wasn't an original RAID level, and is not redundant, however, it's name is RAID_0. Try installing some AID_0 drivers and you'll never get Windows to boot. It's reasonably unreliable, because if one disk fails or data becomes corrupt on a single disk, you lose all data!
RAID_1 is mirrored array, a direct copy of the data being written to each hard drive. RAID_1 is extremely useful, a backup of a backup. If you've got one 500GB hard drive full of data, and the drive fails... You're fucked. Two 500GB drives in RAID_1 mirror the data, which can actually lessen performance, however it's great for storage of important data. If your data isn't important, don't use RAID_1.
RAID_0+1 is a mirrored stripe, while
RAID_1+0 is a stripe of mirrors.
RAID_5 is a striping of parity data across the array, and is somewhat complicated to the point I couldn't explain it. I've never tried for a RAID_5, and won't in the future.

JBOD is Just a Bunch Of Disks. Any two or more disks of any size combined to form a single entity.

There are other levels of RAID, but rare in both practice and practical use.

F6 I know for sure is to load onto Windows XP Pro. Home is for lesser beings.

Whiskey... mirroring is not useless, not at all. If you happen to have a large cache of MP3s, Movies, documents, pictures, application files, or even games... Mirroring that data is important if you value your data, especially if you're one of the unlucky ones to get a bad drive or worse, a Deathstar!

As for the two WD 320GB drives being faster than one WD 150GB Raptor... I think so. Most RAID_0 systems run faster than a single hard drive. The Raptors ARE FAST, but two drives increase the read/write beyond that of a single drive, in my opinion. There is that thing about getting a second 150GB Raptor and then striping them!

{M5}Sniper3 wrote:

And if you don't have a floppy drive?

Use USB.

RAID 0:  Is a striped array.  This requires 2 or more drives and data is split evenly across all drives in the array.  This can improve read/write performance because each drive is only responsible to read/write a smaller portion of the data.  A minimum of 2 drives are required.

Pros: Faster overall performance for reading/writing of data to the hard drive.  Also, stripe create a drive that is the accumulated value of all drives added together.

Cons: Loss of any one drive in the array results in loss of all data in the array.

RAID 1: Two drives in an array where you have a primary drive, with a secondary drive that is a 100% duplicate of the primary.

Pros: 100% data redundancy.  So much so that a system can continue to run even if one of the drives experiences a complete failure.

Cons: There may be slightly reduced performance because of overhead in writing to the primary as well as the secondary drive to maintain data integrity.  Also, as one drive is a perfect mirror of the other, you must have two drives but only get the available space of one drive.

RAID 0+1: A striped array that also has a mirror drive for each drive of the stripe.

Pros: Improved speed of a striped array with the 100% data redundancy of a mirror.

Cons: A minimum of four hard drives is required, and available space is only that of the accumulated stripe array.  Also, due to the larger number of drives being used the chances of a failure are increased.

RAID 5: An array of drives that uses parity bits across the drives in the array for data integrity.

Pros: Speed nearly on par with a stripe, but with some data integrity.

Cons: A minimum of three drives are required.  Even though drive space is an accumulation of all drives in the array, the space of at least one drive is lost to parity, so these arrays become more space efficient as the number of drives increases, but this also increases the chances of failure.  Even though there is a level of redundancy, it is not as redundant as a mirror, and rebuilding an array of this type can take some time.

Also, one main rule to remember about RAID.  It is possible to use drives of different sizes, but the array is built around the smallest drive in the array.  So if, for example, you were to build a stripe using an 80GB drive and a 120GB drive, it would build the array of both drives at the 80GB capacity, resulting in a 160GB array, even though the combined capacity of both drives is 200GB.

KylieTastic wrote:

Bertster7 wrote:

WarriorDave wrote:

... There are other levels of RAID, but rare in both practice and practical use....

There's more than that. Loads of types of RAID. Where's RAID 2, 3, 4, 6 etc?  .....

Read his post, 99% are 0, 1 or 5

If you want to know about others plenty of docs on the net, but Wiki covers the extra ones for peeps that care http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Exactly. The Wikipedia is the bomb for information. I was going to reply to Bertster7, but you cleared that up for me, Kylie.
RAID 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5E, 6, 6E, 7, 50, 60, 100, 300, and the other RAID levels are the most uncommon, mostly due to the amount of disks needed.
Straight from Wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID:
"Theoretically, RAID 2 would require 39 disks in a modern computer environment; 32 disks would be used for storage of the individual bits making up each word, and 7 would be used for error correction. The use of Hamming codes also permits using 7 disks in RAID 2, with 4 being used for data storage and 3 being used for error correction."
Too many disks for common uses.
Agent_Dung_Bomb hit the nail on the head.

EDIT:
Forgot to mention. I have my main gaming system on RAID_0 with two Raptors and 3 WD2500KS, my second system is a storage computer and has 2 WD5000KS on RAID_0 and 4 WD5000KS disks on RAID_0+1.

Last edited by WarriorDave (2006-11-20 17:46:04)