Best way to setup 2x1TB & 1x2TB,

[attacus]

I have two 1 TB hard drives that I want to set up in RAID 0 for performance. I want to back them up to a 2TB hard drive also on the computer. How do I go about doing this? Do I keep using Windows Backup or can I somehow set up the RAID 0 hard drive to mirror to the backup drive in some sort of RAID 1 fashion?

Also what should I expect from RAID 0? Does it get treated as one disc? For example, does defrag work on both disks at the same rate and to the same level?

 

[Pinhedd]

Hi there,

You can theoretically setup the hard drives in raid 1+0 but this would nullify any performance gains made by putting the two 1TB hard drives in RAID-0 because it would be constrained by the slightly slower writes to the 2TB mirror drive. I recommend using a software utility that performs an automatic backup to the 2TB drive every 24 hours or so while you're sleeping. It's not necessary to backup everything, just the stuff that you want to keep.

As to what you should expect will depend on how it's setup.

On an AHCI controller such as the Intel I/O Controller Hub featured on all 900,3,4,5,6,7 series motherboards the two or more member drives will be exposed individually for SMART monitoring purposes but the storage area will be exposed as a single logical volume to the operating system. Thus, volume level operations such as de-fragmentation will span all appropriate disks but disk level operations will impact only the specified device. This is the best of both worlds and works very well.

On discrete RAID controller cards such as those available from 3Ware, EMC, Promise, Dell and HP the operation may differ. Many of these are may operate using different command sets or even translate command sets. As such, monitoring and exposure methodologies may differ.

Performance wise RAID-0 offers diminishing returns. Adding a second disk increases synthetic I/O measurements by about 85-100% which is very good. On real, IO heavy applications this translates to a performance increase of about 33%-50%. On applications that are not heavily dependent on hard drive I/O the performance gain is about 4%-5%

 

[attacus]

OK so I did a backup this morning, and I have one full hard drive and one empty hard drive (both 1TB) using Windows Backup. Since the content of the hard drive is mostly Steam and non Steam games, would those carry over to my RAID setup in exactly the same way they are now or do I need to reinstall everything? As the 1TB hard drive is not my boot drive, the backup didn't offer to make a system image of the disc.

 

[attacus]

Hi there,

You can theoretically setup the hard drives in raid 1+0 but this would nullify any performance gains made by putting the two 1TB hard drives in RAID-0 because it would be constrained by the slightly slower writes to the 2TB mirror drive. I recommend using a software utility that performs an automatic backup to the 2TB drive every 24 hours or so while you're sleeping. It's not necessary to backup everything, just the stuff that you want to keep.

As to what you should expect will depend on how it's setup.

On an AHCI controller such as the Intel I/O Controller Hub featured on all 900,3,4,5,6,7 series motherboards the two or more member drives will be exposed individually for SMART monitoring purposes but the storage area will be exposed as a single logical volume to the operating system. Thus, volume level operations such as de-fragmentation will span all appropriate disks but disk level operations will impact only the specified device. This is the best of both worlds and works very well.

On discrete RAID controller cards such as those available from 3Ware, EMC, Promise, Dell and HP the operation may differ. Many of these are may operate using different command sets or even translate command sets. As such, monitoring and exposure methodologies may differ.

Performance wise RAID-0 offers diminishing returns. Adding a second disk increases synthetic I/O measurements by about 85-100% which is very good. On real, IO heavy applications this translates to a performance increase of about 33%-50%. On applications that are not heavily dependent on hard drive I/O the performance gain is about 4%-5%

Hi. Could you also check my new query please?

 

[attacus]

Hi Attacus.

I use RAID-0 2x1TB (Samsung Spinpoint F3's)
The difference is noticable, and without my SSD, my WEI score was 6.1 for disk speed (hard to get with mechanical 7200rpm drives)

Windows will treat it as one hard disk, which gives great performance and some nice storage space.

The usable amount of space will end in roughly 1850GB

Defrag will work fine in RAID-0.

I have also never had any drive fail on me, or anything become corrupted.

Hi. Could you solve my new query as well?

 

[Pinhedd]

Hi. Could you also check my new query please?

Hi, I don't use any backup software (I'm a rebel) so I'm not sure how Windows Backup works. I imagine that you can have it backup most of the data in your user profile though which is where most user-specific stuff is stored now. You might also be able to specify additional folders such as your steam folder