All your drives have to match, preferably all the same exact model. The
speeds of modern drives have made RAID setups much less useful than they
used to be. They're rarely worth the trouble and the extra hard drive
space is always useful.
Menthol wrote:
> I have been trying to figure this out.....
>
> I want to have a raid0 i.e. striping across 4 sata disks 3x250gb and
> 1x120gb.
>
> I also want my IDE CD-ROM to work.
>
> I can't seem to find the right combo in the Bios on how to set it up
> and when I get the raid setup screen it only shows 2 drives not 4.
>
> Anyone?
>
> Thanks,
> M
>
They have to match in order for me to stripe them? Having
250+250+250+120 and making a 870gb disk out of them?
I could use software to join them as dynamic disks under windows but I
wanted to do that with the existing promise raid on the MSI board.
I know that if I made a raid5 out of them the 250 disks would only
really work as 120's
But a stripe?
-M
On Oct 5, 9:36 am, Glasspider <Glasspi...@spamblock.com> wrote:
> All your drives have to match, preferably all the same exact model. The
> speeds of modern drives have made RAID setups much less useful than they
> used to be. They're rarely worth the trouble and the extra hard drive
> space is always useful.
>
> Menthol wrote:
> > I have been trying to figure this out.....
>
> > I want to have a raid0 i.e. striping across 4 sata disks 3x250gb and
> > 1x120gb.
>
> > I also want my IDE CD-ROM to work.
>
> > I can't seem to find the right combo in the Bios on how to set it up
> > and when I get the raid setup screen it only shows 2 drives not 4.
>
> > Anyone?
>
> > Thanks,
> > M
However, unless you've got a 300G file you need to store, you'd be
better off with multiple drives with multiple drive letters. A stripe of
four drives means a 4x greater chance of complete failure. As individual
drives you have a normal chance of only a partial failure.
'pider
Menthol wrote:
> They have to match in order for me to stripe them? Having
> 250+250+250+120 and making a 870gb disk out of them?
>
> I could use software to join them as dynamic disks under windows but I
> wanted to do that with the existing promise raid on the MSI board.
>
> I know that if I made a raid5 out of them the 250 disks would only
> really work as 120's
> But a stripe?
>
>
> -M
>
> On Oct 5, 9:36 am, Glasspider <Glasspi...@spamblock.com> wrote:
>> All your drives have to match, preferably all the same exact model. The
>> speeds of modern drives have made RAID setups much less useful than they
>> used to be. They're rarely worth the trouble and the extra hard drive
>> space is always useful.
>>
>> Menthol wrote:
>>> I have been trying to figure this out.....
>>> I want to have a raid0 i.e. striping across 4 sata disks 3x250gb and
>>> 1x120gb.
>>> I also want my IDE CD-ROM to work.
>>> I can't seem to find the right combo in the Bios on how to set it up
>>> and when I get the raid setup screen it only shows 2 drives not 4.
>>> Anyone?
>>> Thanks,
>>> M
>
>
Menthol wrote:
> They have to match in order for me to stripe them? Having
> 250+250+250+120 and making a 870gb disk out of them?
>
> I could use software to join them as dynamic disks under windows but I
> wanted to do that with the existing promise raid on the MSI board.
>
> I know that if I made a raid5 out of them the 250 disks would only
> really work as 120's
> But a stripe?
>
>
> -M
Your board has two separate RAID controllers, each with limitations.
(My board has the same chips for this, so I've done some research on
the chips in the past. The following two links, are the RAID manuals
for my board.)
The Promise PDC20378 is connected to the PCI bus. Theoretical bandwidth
is 133MB/sec. Practical speed is a bit less than that, maybe 120MB/sec.
That limitation really makes the potential configurations of the
connectors on the chip, academic. If you put two SATA drives on
there, run them RAID0, then you should see your 120MB/sec. Even if
other interesting modes are available on the chip, you cannot go
faster than about 120MB/sec anyway.
In an ironic twist, the ICH5R is the other way around. The hub bus,
between Northbridge and Southbridge, is capable of 266MB/sec. The
storage controllers inside the Southbridge, are bridged to the hub
bus, and are not limited by PCI. But for some reason, the RAID
feature only works with the SATA ports.
In practical terms, this means you get two, independent, dual SATA
drive RAID 0 arrays. If you could find some third party software to do
a RAID 0 using the resulting RAID arrays (i.e. RAID made from two
RAIDs), then you might see more bandwidth. But the third party
software could cost some money, if it even exists.
Buying another PCI controller is not going to help, because the
PCI bus limit will exist for that card too. (And that is where
a new motherboard with multiple PCI Express connectors, would
help. PCI Express supports high bandwidths.)
As for the storage capacity, if you did a RAID0 with 250+120, the
setup will use 120+120 and the remaining 130 will be inaccessible.
The latest motherboards, that have more SATA connectors, do support
what you want to do. I don't have any performance figures for you,
but I believe it is possible to do a four drive RAID0 on the
boards. The latest Intel Southbridges have six SATA ports, but
the ports are staged on two controllers. One controller has
four drives, the other controller has two drives. Only the four
drive controller is bootable. It is the four drive controller
which would be the candidate for running a four drive RAID0.
Nvidia chipsets also are supposed to have flexible SATA configurations.
The Mediashield Users Manual, from the Nvidia site, suggests that
all ports which support RAID, could be used in a RAID0 (manual says up
to eight drives, if there are eight SATA connectors on the board).
I'd want to see a benchmark, to see whether such a configuration scales
properly or not. It should, since the bus between Northbridge and
Southbridge is not likely to be a bottleneck.
It is not the answer you wanted, but at least you should be able
to make a nice two drive array on the ICH5R. If you want to use the
Promise for a second array, I'd pick up another 250GB drive, so you
can do 250+250 and not lose anything in capacity terms.
I'm still using a single drive on my motherboard :-)
Finally, as a teaser, there is another way to do RAID. Tomshardware
had an article a while back, where they did a hack on Windows,
and Windows can do RAID5 in software. That means your four drives
use ordinary drivers and not RAID drivers, and then Windows does
RAID5 on top of that. The drives don't even have to be on the same
chip. The only reason I did not mention this earlier, is such a
configuration would not be speedy (XOR parity is done in software).
And before you tried it, I'd still want to dump the 120GB and buy
another 250GB, so they match. So this is as close as I can get, to
building a four drive array with your hardware.
>
> On Oct 5, 9:36 am, Glasspider <Glasspi...@spamblock.com> wrote:
>> All your drives have to match, preferably all the same exact model. The
>> speeds of modern drives have made RAID setups much less useful than they
>> used to be. They're rarely worth the trouble and the extra hard drive
>> space is always useful.
>>
>> Menthol wrote:
>>> I have been trying to figure this out.....
>>> I want to have a raid0 i.e. striping across 4 sata disks 3x250gb and
>>> 1x120gb.
>>> I also want my IDE CD-ROM to work.
>>> I can't seem to find the right combo in the Bios on how to set it up
>>> and when I get the raid setup screen it only shows 2 drives not 4.
>>> Anyone?
>>> Thanks,
>>> M
>
>
Old MSI NEO fis2r with promise raid. 
Linear Mode
