RAID solution?

P

peergynt_lwb

New Member
Hi everyone,

Can I implement hardware RAID on my system?

Specifically, I'd like to either stripe or mirror (either RAID 0 or 1) my operating system and some heavy applications (database, application server) across two disks . I don't need fault-tolerance; the reason is purely performance.

My board has 2-IDE controllers that support a total of 4-devices. Nothing abnormal there.

I'm running Win2K Server -- is software RAID my best hope at this point or is there a hardware RAID solution?

I'd appreciate your thoughts,
pg
 
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Win2K stripe v. mirror performance

Thanks for the link suprasteve. I've read loads of articles, but that's the only one so far regarding Win2K Raid 0 performance. Good reading.

Ok Praetor, so I'm stuck with software RAID. It is as I suspected. I was really hoping that I overlooked some special piece of hardware. This was just a last-ditch effort to see if maybe someone could tell me what it is :) Guess not :(

Now I see that I need to work with my Win2K RAID system... How about if I mirror Win2K on one volume and then stripe Oracle and JBoss on another?

On the other hand, if there's not a big read difference between mirroring and striping, then I'd probably just mirror everything for simplicity. Wish I could find performance data regarding Win2k mirroring vs. striping :confused:

Again, talking about 2-disks. The database data would be on a whole seperate disk.
 
Ok Praetor, so I'm stuck with software RAID. It is as I suspected. I was really hoping that I overlooked some special piece of hardware. This was just a last-ditch effort to see if maybe someone could tell me what it is
Click to expand...
If you can spare a small budget, you can get a SYBA SD-SATA150R RAID [$12.99] card. If you need ATA133/100 support instead, the price is a bit higher for the Promise FasTrack 100TX2 [$69.99]

One last thing you might consider if this is applicable (not enough information but I doubt it anyways), is Matrix RAID

Now I see that I need to work with my Win2K RAID system... How about if I mirror Win2K on one volume and then stripe Oracle and JBoss on another?

On the other hand, if there's not a big read difference between mirroring and striping, then I'd probably just mirror everything for simplicity. Wish I could find performance data regarding Win2k mirroring vs. striping
Click to expand...
I would strongly discourage RAID0 ... if you're doing serious work, the gains achieved from RAID0 will be more than offset by the risk you take with your data. If you absolutely need both, consider RAID5.
 
This old mobo

You know, I've thought about using a PCI adapter, like you mention. It might make perfect sense in this case...maybe.

-OS mirrored (Win2K) on two disks from primary 0 and secondary 0
-Oracle and JBoss on two Sata drives with PCI HW RAID
-Database data storage on yet two more Sata drives with PCI HW RAID

So, the apps might be optimized, but the OS would still be like before.

My old board is for a P3 and I don't know much about the chipset-, FSB-, PCI bus-architectures. I wonder if something would ultimately bottleneck the configuration I described above.

Also, I use this machine to develop software. There's no critical data. At worst, I'd need to re-load some apps. I just need it to run these big apps as efficiently as possible.
 
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