SATA RAID Drives

[prolfe]

Hi everyone,
I recently acquired a second SATA HDD. I would like to create a RAID 0 setup using the onboard SATA RAID of my Asrock 939Dual. The thing that concerns me is that the two drives are not alike at all. One is 250GB, SATAII 3Gb/s, NCQ; the other is 120GB, SATAI 1.5Gb/s, no NCQ. If I am willing to lose the benefits of the nicer drive, AND lose 130GB of space on the bigger drive, can I create the RAID 0 setup? Or do the drives have to match to make the onboard RAID work?

P.S. I would not be installing Windows on the RAID, but I would put my swap file there and install all my programs there.
P.P.S. I'm not interested in software RAID, I want to leave the CPU clear to do other things!

 

[hergieburbur]

I think you would be wasting your time trying to RAID those two drives. depending on your controller, you should be able to RAID them, but why? The losses probably outweigh any potential gains. You would be losing NCQ, the space, and likely the speed advantage that the newer drive has over the older one.

Stick with two seperate drives, you wouldn't notice much speed difference vs the fairly high risk of data loss in the RAID array you are talking about implementing. And why pay for the 250 GB drive if you are going to lose over half of it?

You should really only consider RAID0 if you are using identical disks. If you really want RAID0, you can always download a wiping tool and erase the smaller drive, sell it on ebay, and buy another 250GB drive.

 

[prolfe]

Thank you for your reply. The truth of the matter is, I didn't buy the drive, I got it out of a computer given to me for parts so I don't really care about the value of the nice drive. I'm also not sure if my board supports NCQ....it's an Asrock 939Dual SATA II. Should I maybe wipe and sell the faster/more expensive drive then buy a match for the older/slower one? Maybe I'll search THG for some of those HDD reviews that pit new, fast HDDs against RAID arrays to see what my potential gains are.

 

[hergieburbur]

Well, I just bought a new perpendicular recording 320 GB drvie for 95, and I looked at a match for my two 120 GBs at the time to maybe do RAID 5, and they were like 70, so for $25, I got almost three times the drive, and the new one is MUCH faster.

 

[hergieburbur]

So you where wanting to have 3 HDD in the system. You wanted to have a primary drive with windows and then the other 2 in a raid configuration. Can you even do that? Is it posible to set up a Raid 0 with 2 drives and leave the 3rd for the OS?

Yeah, probably 90% + of the RAID 0 implementations in the world are done that one. you should NEVER place your OS on a RAID 0 array, it's way too easy for it to break.

 

[hergieburbur]

There are a lot of different ways to do it. RAID 0 is usually used to only store non-critical data that you want fast access to, and actually works best when the data is read only so that you avoid the write penalty.

Most often you will see an OS drive, a RAID array, and sometimes a seperate disk for more critical data.

 

[prolfe]

Along the same lines as we have been talking here....Is Native Command Queue-ing a function of the Drive, the motherboard, or both?

 

[hergieburbur]

Along the same lines as we have been talking here....Is Native Command Queue-ing a function of the Drive, the motherboard, or both?

The Drive and the Controller both have to support it. TO answer your next question, I don't know if the Uli 1567 Southbridge supports it or not.

 

[prolfe]

Bummer, 'cause I don't think the 1567 does. At least, there is no mention of it on the Asrock website. In that case, I think I'm more likely to try the RAID array, since I can't access one of the speed-features of the faster drive anyway. I'll double-check with Uli though.

 

[theboomboomcars]

P.P.S. I'm not interested in software RAID, I want to leave the CPU clear to do other things!

On board raid controllers use your CPU for processing the info, the chips are just an IO chip and not a processing cpu, they are only marginally better than straight software raids.