raid

[regan1985]

is it possible to set up raid with ide drives and could i do it with a 30gig drive and a 40gig drive.
there both 7200rpm!!!

cheers

[_33]

yes, and yes... But that would be weird.

[DanTheBanjoman]

You can do it, using different disks won't be good for performance though, plus you'll most likely be unable to use 10GB of the 30GB disk.

[regan1985]

good as i have just got a new 250gig for my 2nd machine and i was thing why not use the 2 small drives to run windows and a few key programs to boost performance!

im going to give it a go and see what happens

[inZane]

You cannot setup a RAID0 or RAID 1 configuration with different size drives. You can use the RAID controller to merge those drives together into 1 large size drive, but you will not see any performance increase at all.

[ktr]

You can use the RAID controller to merge those drives together into 1 large size drive, but you will not see any performance increase at all.

option is called: jbod.:toast:

[regan1985]

k i have 2 people telling me different things? which 1 is true

[Aevum]

some performance increse will be seen, as always in JBOD or Raid 0 configurations, it will depend on how the information is spread on both disks

in a ideal world, where data is spread 50-50 between drives, and unicorns jump over rivers of fudge while skimply dressed female elfs address your every need, the speed increse would be 2x,

but if your using different size drives, with different size blocks, different performance conditions and specs and the data will not be evenly spread,
then the increse in overall data retrival would probobly around 10-20% at max, and only when your files are well spread between both drives,

the basic idea of raid0 or JBOD is that you cant change the speed of the drive, but you can have more platters, more heads to read from them and another controller to do the reading, so some increse in performance is gained,

as always, remember that as a partition is spread between 2 or more drives, and the data is spread between drives, if one of the drives fails, then the partition will be incomplete and data on all drives in the array will be lost,

[DanTheBanjoman]

Actually RAID0 splits everything 50-50, it's what stripes are. Performance gain isn't 100% of course but it goes towards it.

[Aevum]

depends on space available on drives and fragmentation, remember, he aint using twin drives, different sizes and i suspect that different speeds.

[Aguiar]

RAID 0 will increase speed performance for system but ill lose 10 GB from the larger HDD.but no problem since they´re same speed.

[Aevum]

i wasnt talking about interface speed, i was talking about mechanical speed,
different plate density, different block and head configuration, impossible to get the same speed for 2 different drives

[DanTheBanjoman]

Well, since the drives are different one is slower than the other. So the faster disk has to wait for the slower one all the time resulting in loss of performance. Most parts of a computer run in sync, things that run out of sync are inefficient in mainstream hardware. (there are some odd exceptions of stuff that's designed to run out of sync, not sure what it was, I once read it)