Legit Reviews

I recently ordered two of those WD 640G AALS drives to replace my 1st gen 74G Raptor. I planed to run these in Striped/RAID0 mode. I only have the onboard RAID controller on my P5W DH motherboard currently. I know superior speeds can likely be achived using a stand alone RAID controller but I'm not particularly interested in spending $100+ on such a card to only gain minimal improvements.

Will I be able to run these at RAID0 using this board or will I need a PCI-E SATA RAID controller?

Should I even bother striping them or will the perforamance improvement be negligable?

you'll see a big improvement running RAID 0 with the onboard controller... I'd say 90% of the people that run RAID on their personal PC don't use hardware raid.

I assume if I ever swap out the board the striped volume will be lost and I'll have to format and reinstall or re-image from a drive image correct?

yup

I have a Raptor drive which will be left over after installing the new RAID. I have considered using it as just for my Windows Swap file. Do you think I'd gain any performance by doing this or will I actually loose some speed?

Skippman wrote:I know superior speeds can likely be achived using a stand alone RAID controller but I'm not particularly interested in spending $100+ on such a card to only gain minimal improvements.

Will I be able to run these at RAID0 using this board or will I need a PCI-E SATA RAID controller?

I read a bunch of discussions regarding RAID and from what I've seen, the consensus seems to be for simple RAID0 or RAID1, there's no need for a dedicated controller. Performance benefits will only be noticeable when you go RAID5/6.

As for swap, no idea. Bump up the RAM so you don't need the swap file.

hnzw_rui wrote:

Skippman wrote: As for swap, no idea. Bump up the RAM so you don't need the swap file.

Well, I'm running 8GB right now which is as much as the board will handle so I'm not even sure how much the swap file is used. Was just a thought of how to use some existing hardware on hand. I might just end up selling the Raptor drive. The 200GB is going to be my servers new boot drive.

Well, I'll be installing the RAID today when I get back from breakfast at about 11CST. Before I got down to the nitty gritty I took the change to read Nates RAID Guide which, ironically enough, was the first one Google brought up when I searched. I was reading about the Stripe Size. Nate recommended setting it to 128K but other RAID 0 guides I've read recommended far smaller sizes such as 16K. I was hoping to get some personal opinions on this before I do the nasty today and gut/reinstall my system.

What experience have you other RAID 0 users had? Is 16K best, or is 128K best?

Well, i'm now running in RAID 0 on my two new WD Caviar Black drives. Things seem to be going well and Vista's installed. Thanks for the tips guys.

Skippman wrote:Well, I'll be installing the RAID today when I get back from breakfast at about 11CST. Before I got down to the nitty gritty I took the change to read Nates RAID Guide which, ironically enough, was the first one Google brought up when I searched. I was reading about the Stripe Size. Nate recommended setting it to 128K but other RAID 0 guides I've read recommended far smaller sizes such as 16K. I was hoping to get some personal opinions on this before I do the nasty today and gut/reinstall my system.

What experience have you other RAID 0 users had? Is 16K best, or is 128K best?

Trial and error really, it depends on the drives. SSDs work well ( at least OCZs) with a 128k stripe size

Skippman wrote:I assume if I ever swap out the board the striped volume will be lost and I'll have to format and reinstall or re-image from a drive image correct?

well i switch out a board and it still recognized the striped. but it was a 2 boards that uses nvidia raid systems so that might be why =o.

Has anyone messed with RAID 10? I'm considering going to that when I do my next build this fall. That new Corsair case really has me thinking and a close call with my stipe set the other day has me a bit paranoid.