RAID 0 Questions...

i am also intrested in this.

also if going from a non raid setup.

then going to a raid 0

is it recomended that you reformat?

Well ill join the camp too p:

1.) You will defo see statistical improvements, such as with sandras benchmark, it depends on your usage as to whether you notice real world improvements, games should benefit through faster access times etc.

2.) I see no reason why more heat would be generated, though could imagine the heat being spread more like you say.

3.) Good q about the defrag, not sure now that I think of it.

I agree about formatting, as for battery life, possibly but I cant see it being drastic. Perhaps knocks of a few minutes.

In my opinion, nothing that would make it worth the increased risk of data loss. What kind of applications are you running? For most desktop applications, the limiting aspect of hard drives is rotational latency-- not sustained transfer rates--since you're usually requesting data that's spread around the platters. Exergy pointed to faster load times for games, but that's not even guaranteed to be a big win. Many times games are puling data that isn't contiguous on the drives and RAID can only hurt you there because of the overhead. If you're looking to get better transfer rates from your disks, look to RAID1; it offers the same (theoretical) increase in read rates that RAID0 does and improves data intgegrity, but costs you half your disk space (that is, 2 80 GB drives will only net you 80 GB of storage space under RAID1).

It will definitely generate more heat and put more strain on all the other cooling devices in your laptop. Under RAID0, every file write and read will require work be done by both hard drives and will require some work from the CPU (the integrated RAID solutions out there do the RAID calculations in the driver).

The drive will appear as 1 volume to the OS and tools like defrag and scandisk will work as usual. You will not be able to get SMART information from the drives so you won't be able to easily monitor the health of the drives.

And never assume a file system will be able to keep itself free from fragmentation.

EDIT: Regarding the question about formatting. Most of the integrated RAID solutions can turn a standard disk into a RAID0 or RAID1 volume if you add a disk at a later point without doing a format and install.

Yeah, in RAID1 writes will be duplicated on both drives and reads will be split between the two. Putting different applications on different hard drives won't make a big difference. Unless you're actually running Photoshop (or whatever) while playing a game (and I mean actually running it--not just leaving it opened but minimized), it won't require anything of the hard drive. Your first drive will be accessed if that's where the pagefile is, though. In your case, I'd put all the applications on the drive with Windows and my data on the second drive. I'd also let Windows create 2 pagefiles--one on each drive--so it can page to whatever drive is being used the least.

I think you're speaking of RAID 1 (mirroring) here, AFAIK going from non-RAID or any other versions of RAID to RAID 0 (striping) always entails repartitioning, reformat and reinstall. You could use a disk imaging utility to speed up the process if you're happy with your current windows install.

Shandy, in RAID 1, your disks are mirrored. The 2nd disk is a mirror of the 1st. You won't have access to the 2nd disk as a separate volume.

If you have 2 60 GB disks in a RAID 1 setup. you'll only have 60 GB of space.
(The other 60 becomes the mirror)

Benefits: fail-over. If one of the drives dies. Your data will still be on the other so your work continues on without any problem. Just replace the failed drive, and rebuild the mirror in the controller setup.

Woland, I think you need to read up on what RAID 1 is. You won't have control over what gets written where on either drive. All writes get duplicated to both drives, including page files.

i've set up raid0 on my M3438.

Sandra HD benchmark showed 29mb\s without raid, with raid0 i getting 55mb\s.

I hope you back up frequently. If one of your drives die or has some sort of data corruption, you're going to lose your entire striped array. Which means ALL DATA LOST.

Any Intel boards that support RAID can turn a volume that is not a member of an array into a RAID array if you have free, non-RAID-member volumes with sufficient capacity. In other words, if you have a regular hard drive setup and add a second drive, the system can combine the two drives into a RAID1 or RAID0 array. I've done it before. Hell, I did it in Windows while surfing espn.com. nForce4 boards (and I believe nForce3 boards) can also build RAID volumes on the fly.

How is that not an accurate description of RAID1? Writes are duplicated and the controller will pull data from both drives and reasseble it for the OS. Shandy was asking about putting different applications on different disks, i.e., a non-RAID solution to the problem.

hrm, I just had a thought, dangerous I know, but what if you had two RAID 0 arrays, could you RAID 1 them together? total of 4 HD that looks like 1HD. then you could concievably get the throughput of a RAID 0 with the security of a RAID 1. I know it isn't to concievable for a notebook/DTR. I was just thinking.... >stand back<

you can have raid0+1
4 drives total, 2 in raid 0 and the other 2 being a mirror of the first.
Lots of people do this, as it has the benifits and the redundancy.
I run this in my desktop. (8x300 gig sata seagates, shows as one 1200 gig drive) but windows doesnt like drives that big, so I have it partitioned as 2 600 gig drives, but it acts like 1 drive when partitioning.


Raid 1 will just cause more heat as both drives are being used when one would only normally be used.

Raid 0 will have the same heat issue, but its alsot more stressfull, the reason raid ) makes things faster is because it uses the drives burst write speed and access. it also doubles the cache.
Desktop drives usually have a much shorter life span in raid 0, unless you get something made for the stress like scsi drives, which are also generally faster too.
I replace a drive every year or so, they start off by making a bad sound, and your raid software should tell you that there is a problem, its been my experiance that a problem drive gets much hotter then the others.