Hard disks for new VISTA 64 rig

[Cr0nJ0b]

I'm beginning to get the parts for my new build. I've got an E8400 $159, 4GB (2 x 2GB) Corsair 1066MHz $104, ASUS P5Q-E, eVGA 260 OC $225, and a whole lot of 500GB SATA II hard drives. The only other SATA device I have is a DVD burner and I have another IDE CDROM burner as well.

First of all, I love RAID 0, I've lived with it for years and I know storage pretty well, so I'm ok with the fault tolerance. That said, i have 7 open SATA ports. I'm not sure how many drives I can put into a RAID 0 stripe on this board, but I'm hoping to go to at least 5.

AGAIN, DISCLAIMER....I know more drives = greater chance of failure. But it also means more speed. I don't plan to use all the capacity, since I'm not quite dumb enough to have a 3TB RAID0 volume that is full of important data....I'll probably use about what I use today, which is 200-300GB. The rest will be slack space, or I'll setup a temp volume or something.

I have the 500GB drives, so I don't really care about wasting the space.

That will leave me with 2 drives that I can mirror for my user files.

My question is (not knowing vista, which is the OS I'll be using), can I separate user files easily from the base OS. I know in linux is pretty easy to setup the volumes like this, but I'm not sure how it's done in Vista (business 64bit).

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Madwand1]

I'd probably set up the OS on a separate drive on one of the secondary controllers, and put the rest of the drives in Intel Matrix RAID -- RAID 0 for a smallish fast array and RAID 5 for the bulk -- secondary storage. Note that transfers between the RAID 0 and RAID 5 will be slowish, as they'll involve a lot of seeking. Transfers to/from the single separate OS drive could be faster. ICH9R and later should handle all 6 drives in RAID 0 and/or RAID 5.

If you don't need that much space, and want to speed up transfers between the "secure" and "fast" arrays, then your idea of a separate mirror could be better.

RAID 5 needs write back caching for write performance, so I'd turn that on if I was using it. I'd also experiment at the onset with different stripe sizes for performance impact (probably preferring a small stripe size such as 16 KiB). This, among other things, is a lot easier with the OS on a separate drive.

You should probably turn on RAID in the BIOS before installing the OS.

 

[Stageman]

I'm curious about something, have you ever experienced a catastrophic failure with a RAID 0 system?

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Funny you should ask....

Actually this last weekend, my system failed to boot. I had known for a while that one of the drives was failing...but I was too lazy to swap it out. sure enough, it started blue screening during boot.

Now this could be your run of the mill filesystem corruption, which has happened before. but I'm guessing that a couple blocks or clusters on the disks failed to be read.

In this case, i'm not all that upset, since all the data is still there. I have a backup and I still have access to the boot disks. I just boot from my backup and i'm running again. to fix this I could either reload the OS, or clone the backup...

In my case, i'm building a new rig anyway, so I'll hobble along until all my parts are in, then just load and go.

More directly. I've never had a hard disk that I was using in a RAID0 set fail to power on, or fail to read completely. They usually just die a slow death.

 

[Madwand1]

I tend to use RAID 5 instead of RAID 0, but I've seen several problems with them involving loss of RAID definition / dropping drives -- not exactly the same as an actual drive failure, but equally or more catastrophic in effect. The last one I recall encountering was during an nVIDIA RAID tool/driver upgrade. It then decided that I no longer had a 3-drive RAID 5 array, but instead had one 3-drive array in a degraded state with a drive missing, and another separate array on the other drive. As this was RAID 5, I was able to recover it after several hours, by destroying the second "array", and then re-assigning it to the first array and re-building it.

With RAID 0, I would have had no such options, and the dropping of a single drive even temporarily could mean significant data loss.

The point here is that on-board or any form of RAID introduces another point of failure, and as with everything, this is not just theory, it fails at times in practice, even without a drive failure. Of course, the reverse is also true -- in some cases, you can have systems running for years without problems.