Raid 0 and XP

Has anyone a view as to whether a Raid 0 array really offers any significant
and noticeable advantages in speed under XP? I've a fairly up to date set
up - P4 3.2 chip, 1gb of memory and 2 x 160gb drives and am wondering how to
set it up. Raid 0 was the flavour of the month a year or so back but you
don't hear much about it these days.

Regards,
RoS

Raid 0 is a fine way to loose all your files... Unless you are working
with very large files the minuscule performance difference is simply not
worth the hassles.

John

RoS wrote:

Has anyone a view as to whether a Raid 0 array really offers any significant
and noticeable advantages in speed under XP? I've a fairly up to date set
up - P4 3.2 chip, 1gb of memory and 2 x 160gb drives and am wondering how to
set it up. Raid 0 was the flavour of the month a year or so back but you
don't hear much about it these days.

Regards,
RoS

Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29

RAID Explained
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=24

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Client

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"RoS" wrote:

| Has anyone a view as to whether a Raid 0 array really offers any significant
| and noticeable advantages in speed under XP? I've a fairly up to date set
| up - P4 3.2 chip, 1gb of memory and 2 x 160gb drives and am wondering how to
| set it up. Raid 0 was the flavour of the month a year or so back but you
| don't hear much about it these days.
|
| Regards,
| RoS

That's interesting. I've never found such a well argued critique of Raid 0
before and I'm frankly surprised that the great majority of manufacturers
were adopting this configuration not so long ago in machines with 2 hard
drives as if no other alternative existed.

Which leads on to the question, what is the best configuration of 2 drives
and how should they in turn be set up?

My initial personal preference is to go for a dual boot arrangement with XP
on both drives and to treat one as a secure 'not to be messed with' set up;
the other as a 'let's see what happens if ' area. The reasoning behind this
thinking derives from past experience. The fun side of my computing
involves some digital photography and messing around with Flight Sim. There
are so many irresistible add-ons to the latter that sooner or later disaster
strikes when a bug infested add-on has been installed and the only practical
solution is to uninstall FS and start again. It would be good to have a
copy of a known stable version available, wholly independent of the other
which would be in the nature of a test bed. It would also be stress
reducing to have an independent storage area for photo images.

Does this sound OK? And finally, apart from a chunk of the drive(s) being
set aside for data storage (again in duplicate as a backup) is there really
any advantage at all of having multiple partitions? The 'C' drive, with XP
on it, seems to end up with so many vital bits on it from just about
anything else installed - in the registry for example - that it seems
pointless to adopt the "keep the 'C' drive mean and lean and install
everything else on another partition".

RoS

RoS wrote:
That's interesting. I've never found such a well argued critique of Raid 0
before and I'm frankly surprised that the great majority of manufacturers
were adopting this configuration not so long ago in machines with 2 hard
drives as if no other alternative existed.

Manufacturers, like software vendors, reserve and often practice their
right to be stupid


Which leads on to the question, what is the best configuration of 2 drives
and how should they in turn be set up?

My initial personal preference is to go for a dual boot arrangement with XP
on both drives and to treat one as a secure 'not to be messed with' set up;
the other as a 'let's see what happens if ' area. The reasoning behind this
thinking derives from past experience. The fun side of my computing
involves some digital photography and messing around with Flight Sim. There
are so many irresistible add-ons to the latter that sooner or later disaster
strikes when a bug infested add-on has been installed and the only practical
solution is to uninstall FS and start again. It would be good to have a
copy of a known stable version available, wholly independent of the other
which would be in the nature of a test bed. It would also be stress
reducing to have an independent storage area for photo images.

A drive image backed up to 2nd drive or USB drive and restore CD might
give you more security and flexibility. Drive image is compressed to
save space, can have many image copies from various dates.

http://www.freecomputerconsultant.co...rue-image.html


Does this sound OK? And finally, apart from a chunk of the drive(s) being
set aside for data storage (again in duplicate as a backup) is there really
any advantage at all of having multiple partitions? The 'C' drive, with XP
on it, seems to end up with so many vital bits on it from just about
anything else installed - in the registry for example - that it seems
pointless to adopt the "keep the 'C' drive mean and lean and install
everything else on another partition".

RoS



Multiple partitions is sometimes advantageous for organizing data. In
the past there was efficiency (smaller data chunks used) in smaller
partitions. Nobody worries about that anymore.

Anymore, most seem to recommend just one big partition. Frustratingly,
if a 2nd partition is available to the OS, sometimes Microsoft will dump
a big temporary file there or Outlook's MSO cache without even asking.
Which means of course that malware can also access it; which is why a
USB drive that can be unplugged - even carried to another location, is
so nice.

www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:41:23 +1000, RoS wrote:

Which leads on to the question, what is the best configuration of 2 drives
and how should they in turn be set up?

If both drives are the same size and you have a HARDWARE RAID Controller,
use RAID-1 and setup as a Mirrored Pari as one large Partition.

If you use multiple partitions you gain no performance, in fact, you may
have performance loss, but, you gain organization if you're not good at
keeping files orgainized normally.

If you have a motherboard RAID controller, they typically use CPU time and
have no cache, this means you get much less performance than a quality
RAID controller would provide. In RAID-1, reads are faster, but writes are
slower.

I would never use a RAID-0 solution on any system where I valued the data.


--
Leythos
(remove 999 for proper email address)

Thanks people for a lot of useful information which I'll be chewing over
carefully before taking the plunge.

However, I think the Raid 0 route will be abandoned. I was put off when I
was seeking help from Gigabyte. Australia regrettably falls within the
Asia/Pacific region for most things and the supplied supporting software and
documentation was less than clear. But contact with Gigabyte was even
worse. I will forever treasure an email from them saying how sorry they
were that I thought them incontinent. They may well have been, but it was
competence I was challenging! That sort of response doesn't instil
confidence in the end user! In the end someone from California sent me a
link to a US site which had a illustrated child's guide on how to set it up.
And the infuriating thing was that the relevant drivers were on one of the
supplied CDs, just damn near impossible to find in Gigabytespeak.

RoS