Software RAID Help


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I have two 20gb 7200 rpm Western Diggies, I'd like to take a look at Software RAID.

I read an article on THG about software RAID but haven't been able to get it working ( I want to stripe), if anyone has experience with this I'd appreciate the help, thanks.

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From technet

You create a stripe set by completing the following steps:

In the Disk Management Graphical view, right-click an area marked Unallocated on a dynamic disk and then choose Create Volume. This starts the Create Volume Wizard. Read the welcome dialog box, and then click Next.

Select Striped Volume as the volume type. Create the volume as described previously in this chapter in the section entitled "Creating Volumes and Volume Sets." The key difference is that you need at least two dynamic disks to create a striped volume.

Once you create a striped volume, you can use the volume just like any other volume. You can't expand a stripe set once it's created. Because of this, you should carefully consider the setup before you implement it.

***edit***

here is the link i got this from

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/...ze/c11w2kad.asp

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Consider these things carefully.

Like he said, your drives must be converted to DYNAMIC disks from BASIC disks.

Second, each drive MUST be on a different IDE channel.

Third, to create a stripe, you must have unused partion space to create one, because all data on a partition that is used (on either drive) will be destroyed in the stripe creation.

Fourth, if you ever 'break' a stripe and don't have a backup, you will not be able to get your data on striped disks back.

Additionally, you can never reinstall the 2000/XP OS's with a DYNAMIC disks and stripes, because the system prevents you from doing so. If you force the boot/system partition to BASIC disk, you will also loose all data on a software dynamic stripe.

Just a few thoughts. If however, you really need the speed of a stripe for disk access, you are better off buying a third drive for OS/boot/system and a hardware solution like from Promise Tech for the two drives to stripe (RAID 0).

Software stripes using dynamic disks in 2000/XP are just as fast as hardware solutions and just a reliable, however each solution has drawbacks and potential problems. For experimentation, the software stripe is sufficient for most people.

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I agree with what Justin L said except the three item, depends on how you set up the stripe. Unless they have changed this greatly in XP

If you stripe two hdds together you then fall under the conditions that Justin described. But lets say on disk 0 (active disk) you have two partitions. one OS ©, one Files and etc(D). Then on disk 1 you have nothing.

If you can stripe D with disk1 and will not lose anything. But you cannt break this set. If one of the HDDs fails you will need to have a backup of data because you will not be able to recover it.

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Interesting . . .

I haven't played with stripes in XP only 2000. I didn't know 2000/XP wouldn't overwrite the data in the stripe format, so that was my recommendation. During the stripe creation there is a format process and I assumed that Disk Manager was not capable of preserving data with a format, therefore I haven't tried it.

Also, every partition that is part of the stripe (from each harddrive) must be the same physical size (in bytes) as far as I know. Partitions that are to participate in the stripe must be on separate IDE channels and separte physical harddrives. Since most PC's only have two IDE channels, that limits the number of partitions that may participate in any one stripe to 2, although between any two hard drives you may have as many stripes as desired.

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