raid cards/ raid

[plato333]

hey guys. i read through the forums on raid but i still come out with some questions..
ive never tried raid and therefore know just about nothing. what i would like to do is set up raid 0 with 4 raptors on a striker extreme. so do i need a raid card? any recommendations? also where do i set up the raid from? bios or windows? thanks!

[IanB]

what i would like to do is set up raid 0 with 4 raptors on a striker extreme. so do i need a raid card?

People with Striker Extremes will probably need to chime in here, but my understanding is that that's an nVidia chipset you'd be attaching your drives to, and those are notoriously bad at RAID, with bugs and poor performance throughout the chipset range. If this is a 790i board, then SATA disk corruption in RAID has been reported. This may or may not be fixable by future BIOS flash, it could well be a deficiency of the silicon itself.

Also, once you get above 3 disks in RAID 0, the performance of onboard RAID solutions seems to suffer a little and you'd be better off getting a dedicated hardware solution. This was just hashed out somewhat argumentatively in a recent thread.

So FWIW, if you want to be SURE about the quality and reliability of the RAID you will get on your nVidia board, a RAID card may well be the best solution if you can afford one. Make sure you have a x4 (at least) PCIe slot free and get a PCIe card for it. Since you are wanting RAID 0, you won't need a ridiculously expensive card, just one that can handle 4 ports: HighPoint 23xx series, Adaptec 1430SA etc.. Check reviews for the model you select carefully or ask back for user feedback from people who actually have them here. Of course, if you have the money to burn, then future-proof yourself with a much more reliable and expensive card, like the Adaptec 5405 or 5805, which seem to be the hot new cards of first choice, but somewhat overkill for what you need.

Once you have your card and disks attached, you set the RAID up from the utility provided or in the BIOS at system boot time (there will be a key combo to enter the card BIOS). The problem is you won't be able to migrate your OS directly to that if you want to boot from it, which is what you really want to do for best resulting speed. Options are to install the drivers for the card in Windows then clone your current system partition onto the new RAID drive, after which you then set the booting adapter/partition in your BIOS as the one attached to the RAID card and you should be set... or to reinstall Windows from scratch onto the new RAID partition (using the F6 floppy supply or whatever the Vista equivalent is to provide the install with the RAID card drivers) after setting the booting adapter/partition in BIOS.

Rather than RAIDing the entire size of the 4 raptors in a single partition, to tweak the RAID setup for best performance, work out which of your apps/games etc. you want to load fastest along with the OS using the RAID 0 partition and calculate the total disk space needed with a good margin. Ideally you want to use about the first 10% to 15% of each of your raptors to make this fast RAID stripe, as that's the part of the disk which gets the fastest streaming data speed, and if the majority of your system read/writes are concentrated in that small area then the seek times will be fastest. This is often called "short-stroking". You then have around 90% of the raptors left to use in other ways or RAID for a little more data security, like two mirrors, or a RAID 5 across all 4, if the RAID card allows that. Ideally again, what you want to do is use that space only for archive data that's accessed rarely, so as not to slow your overall seek times by causing many disk accesses away from the fast RAID stripe, and/or for backing up the RAID 0 in case it fails.

EDIT: If you are upgrading by adding 3 new raptors to match ONE of your existing ones, guessing the 150GB one, then you'll have a 74GB raptor spare. That'd be good for running apps/games from separate from your RAIDed drives, or for temp space if you do video/photo-editing, or pagefile, or torrents or anything else that might be accessed frequently and simultaneously with whatever you put in your fast stripe, so it won't affect your read/write speed there. However at a 15% RAID stripe you'd have 4 x 15% x 150GB = 90GB space in that fast partition, easily enough for OS and apps and a great deal more. Since the raptors are so fast, this 15% figure isn't hard and fast, set what you need if that isn't enough.

[lowbid]

I was using a areca 1230 on a striker extreme with 4 150 raptors the card in a 8x slot with 2 8800 ultras and it ran fine with no file corruption.My problem was trying to get a quad to run with 4 sticks of ocz 9200 flex and it died but it was not do to the raid card.Had the same problem with the striker II but the raid card worked fine also.So Iam back to my first 680i board asus p5nt-ws with a e8500 with the same memory and 2 8800 and the raid card works fine.The 1230 is a bit over kill but i had it laying here and could not get the nivida raid to work with out corruption.

There are alot more people here with experience on raid cards than me that could recommend one for you if that is the way you want to go.This is my experience with raid on a striker.

[stevecs]

I had two striker extremes (both boards eventually died), but I started with the on-board raids on those systems (raid-10) and got fed up with trying to control the performance better as well as the pain in trying to rebuild when the drives would drop. I went to an Areca solution for the card and swapped out the drives w/ seagate ones. (the last two WD drives I have are below and those are going to be short lived, as soon as I get confirmation that the sas expanders work w/ the arecas).

You may be able to get it to work under windows (linux is another matter, it wasn't working the last time I tried ~ year ago). keep good backups regardless as you will probably need to rebuild.

RAID is set up on the SE (on-board) once you enable it in the bios and then you have a 2nd INT 19 boot screen were you can set up your raid. Nothing fancy. You need to have the windows drivers though for it to work (it is a 'fake' raid setup (software). Likewise with a hardware card that is also generally set up in the card's bios.

[xMrBunglex]

those Arecas are really expensive. most people that aren't running servers don't need those expensive RAID cards. i only use Intel chipsets for myself and i've never had any problems with their onboard Matrix RAID. i built a computer for a friend a year ago with a 680i motherboard and he's been running onboard RAID-0 from day 1 without any problems whatsoever. no corruption, no problems.

if you're installing Vista you can just go off the installation DVD after setting up RAID in your BIOS. with XP you need to add RAID drivers while installing Windows, which is kind of pain to do for a first-timer. you can either use a floppy disk and the F6 installation method or you can slipstream the driver into your Windows installation disc. that latter method is very easy to do now that we have a program called nLite to help us.

[plato333]

thanks for the replies guys. really helped me out