RAID and reformatting

[gt07]

Just a quick question here. I currently have a raid 0 setup and am obviously unable to partition the array. Is there anyway to set things up so that when I reformat my C drive i won't lose all my data.

I'm wanting to grab 2 more drives and put it in raid 5 but am semi-reluctant if I'm going to lose everything on a reformat regardless.

 

[eklass]

afaik when you want to format your raid array, you'll have to have the drivers loaded and manipulating the drives as an array, not individual drives. this means a format is going to kill everything

 

[Jiggz]

I dont' understand why you were not able to partition the drives when they were on raid 0. But that's a different topic. Anyways, you can try Partition Magic to partition the drive (raid drive) and then move all your data to the second partition and will be able to format your c: drive. You will lose all data on the C: drive. One method I use, is to get a third hdd with the size equal to the sum of the first two drives. For example, I have 2 80GB drives in Raid 0 (partitioned into two logical drives) and then I have a third hdd, 160 GB (also partitioned as two logical drives) as primary on my 1st channel IDE. I clone the raid into the 3rd hdd once in a while. When ever there is a problem on the raid 0 setup all I do is switch my boot drive to HDD 0 and everything will be the same. Then I can recreate my raid back again with very little data lose. Of course, with RAID 0+1, using 4 drives is even better but it cost more.

 

[gt07]

nevermind then, i guess i can partition it. for some reason i was under the impression that i couldn't. go figure :-/

 

[imported_bajan]

I say forget about RAID unless you want the redundancy. I've been running RAID0 arrays for almost 2 years now and i have noticed NO real performance difference compared to one drive running by itself. Right now i have two WD 120gb drives in RAID0 and i really can't tell the difference compared to when i run only on one.

What you can do is just and setup the two drives in RAID1. That way you have "real-time backups" because of course everything is mirrored between the drives, and there's NO performance loss. But of course you loose capacity. At least this way if one drives fails, all you have to do is take it out and run on the second drive until you can replace the dead one. Once you install a new on, all the data will be mirrored onto the new drive.

The best thing you can do though is like Jiggz said... setup a RAID0+1 array. That way you get the supposed speed gain of RAID0 plus the redundancy of RAID1. BUT, as i said earlier, RAID0 really isn't worth it. It's only good for servers where huge databases are in use and there's constant, random data accesses occurring.

Just my $0.02