Is It Posable To Run 2 Seperate Raid Setups? (+Hard Drive Recomindation For My Setup)

SubDude199

SubDude199

Member
Here is my situation: I am building a Q6600 system and I would like to run a specific setup for the hard drives:

Hard Drive Configuration: I am not sure how I want to configure it I would like to run 4 hard drives total. I dont know if this is posable but I was going use two of those hard drives to run my Primary (C) Partition in RAID 0: Striped for increased speeds but no fault tolerance from disk errors since I reformat often and dont keep important data on my OSS Partition, and the other 2 for my BackUP Partition (D) Running RAID 1: Mirrored for fault tolerance from disk errors and single disk failure but no speed increase since its just for holding my Music, Movies, Game Installers (Stuff that does not need amazing transfer speeds I just need to be sure I never lose the data) If it is possable to run 2 seperate and diffrent raid setups like this, I would like to have the Primary (C) Partition have a total of atleast 160GB using two hard drive of atleast 80GB, and a total of 500GB using two 500GB Hard Drives for BackUP (D).


Another question is - is the Raid0 really necisary for the primary hard drive(s). I have read that with SATAII there is only a TINY increase in speed when running raid. Is that true?. should I just get one drive for the OSS?.. That would simplift things. I do absolutly need to run RAID1 on the backup as that is data I can not lose. So in your opinion is RAID going to help me any on the OSS disk(s)?.. Thanks


So having said that I do also need help deciding on hard drives. I do not know EXACTLY all the details I need to be looking for in a good hard drive but I do know that I want to look for hard drives that are SATA2 (3GB/s), RPM no lower than 7200, and a Cache of 16MB. Is there anything else I need to be looking at when chosing a hard drive besides size?

How are these?

RAID0 Primary : For running OSS, Using Raid0 to increase speed (Unless you think I will not benifit much from running Raid0 here, or its not posable to run two seperate and diffrent raid setups, in that case just one of these, I only need 100GB total on this drive(s) total anyway)
RAID1 Backup: Nothing to amazing, just two 500GB Hard drives to run my backup partition using Raid1

any sugestions. I would like to spend no more than $300 on the whole setup if posable.

Thanks for the help!
 
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I haven't used RAID myself, I really don't think there's a need for it for a home user but I'm pretty sure if you want to run 2 different raid levels you'll need 2 raid controllers.

I would only use a single drive for your OS, it'll be faster in RAID0 but like I said most people don't need it as a single drive is usually fast enough. Things like video editing usually benfit from a stripe array, I don't think your boot time will be all that much faster and unless you have excessive paging booting is probably going to be the most hard drive intensive thing that you will do.
 
ok. so it may be true what I heard about that, modern day drives are fast as they sit, and the only real reason to RAID anymore is if you can save money buying two smaller drives (two 500GB's cheeper than on 1000GB) or you want to run RAID1 to be safe. So I think that is what I will do, maybe buy a RaptorX for me OSS drive and then just run RAID1 for my backup.

(because im in a race for points in 3DMark06 and PCMark05 I will run raid using my 2 backup 500GB hard drives as my OSS RAID0 just to get a good score then I will change back to using them as backups in RAID1.. hehe, im sure it will boost my numbers a tiny bit.. what a cheeter, lol)

So do you have any recemondation for the main drive?.. I think I read a review here that says that there is no reason to buy that RaptorX drive because its not much better - is that true? How about the backup 500Gb drives? are the ones I selected prety good drive?

Thanks
 
A raptor is a good single drive, you don't need to buy a raptor X, a normal raptor bascially the same you just lose the clear cover. It does have more cache and is a real SATA drive instead of having a PATA->SATA bridge chip on it. A raptor X would probably score slightly higer than a normal one but I don't think it would be significantly higher.

For the 500GB drives, it's more or less which costs the right amount. All the manufacturers are about equal so whatever drive you like the best is the way to go. The 7200.10 series from seagate uses perpendicular recording so it is faster than older longitudinal recording drives.
 
ok then, I think I will go with THIS Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10KRPM SATA drive for my main and forget the RAID there


and keep my original 500GB hard drive from the first post for my backup running RAID1.


that look good?.. That is SATAII correct?... thanks
 
Well I think the best solution for you if you really want to go this route would be a RAID 0 + 1. This requires 4 drives and basically is just a mirrored set of RAID 0 drives.

However, I must let you know you will find hardly any performance increase from running stripped drives unless you actually take advantage of the speed. If you work with large amounts of data, video edit, render digital audio, 3D rendering, etc you would take advantage of the performance increase.

Basic usage and things like gaming do not really benefit from running a RAID. Setting up a RAID is easy. You first do it in the BIOS of the RAID controller and then simply make sure the windows installer (or Linux) sees it as RAID 0 or 1 or whatever. Then the rest is just like a normal OS install.

RAID 1 actually slows performance a bit on your computer because it has to synchronize the hard drives so that they both read/write data at the exact same time.

Overall running a RAID really doesn't benefit the end user. In my view its more of a server side solution unless you do the following I mentioned before. It won't increase your FPS in gaming, all it would do is make your loading time some what faster.

It also increases the risk of system failure since the data is split amongst two separate drives.
 
2x150 raptor already over 300 dollars. your budget wont fullfill the requirements. even 2x36 raptor + 2 500gb = over 400 dollars.
 
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