Making my home PC raid

[ranj]

Hi

 

I got a query which I hope someone can help me with.

 

I have got a 250gb sata 2 drive in my PC, with the work that I am doing (video editing, visual studio) i think it would be a good idea for me to make my PC more redundant incase of failure and I have been told that putting two hard drives in and making it RAID 1 would improve performance slightly and also give me redundancy. My motherboard is an Asustek P5ND2-SLI S775 nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition c19 ATX which supports software RAID.

 

At the moment I have the following hard drive (maxtor 250Gb sata 2 7V250F0 HDD) in my PC, this is now discountinuted.

 

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3XR8&CategorySelectedId=11154&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11154%2C40970000%2C42240000%2C50413

 

I was wondering if i brought the current model of a maxtor disk (similar specification) or any other 250GB hard drive from another manufacturer, would i be able to use these two different hard drives and make them RAID 1? I understand that doing this wont give me the best performance as if they were the same hard drives and exactly the same spec.

 

I just need other peoples opinions on this. I dont want to go the external drive route, I rather leave everything internal inside the PC. I have got too many gadgets using all my USB ports as it is.

 

Any advice would be appreciated

 

thanks

[Guest Guest]

RAID 1 is only mirrored so you will see a slight *drop* in performance for writing. Read will be quicker.

 

RAID 0 is striping ie performance but no redundancy.

 

 

 

It doesnt matter that you cant find the exact same model, it would be better for raid 0 but 1 its fine.

[Oops_my_bad]

Wouldnt bother with software raid.. are you sure the built in one isnt hardware?

[Joedetic]

Hardware raid is the best in my opinion. I've got a server at home with three 18GB hot swap SCSI disks in it running at RAID-5.

 

With raid 1 you loose the most disk space. 50% of the physical diskspace available is devoted to redundancy.

 

If you were to get three disks however you could do a raid 5 which is a striped set with distributed parity. So a good redundancy.

[Oakie]

Two different hard drives makes good sense to me. 2 drives that were identical from the same batch could conceivably suffer from the same failure at the same time, no ? Two different drives could have the same mean time between failure in hours, but with different manufacturing dates and different construction materials, seems like you could increase your odds that the failures would occur at separate times.

 

I have a win 2oo3 fileserver box with software raid. It works excellently. I have even replaced one drive so far. I simply partioned it to match the working setup, and the raid process automatically rebuilt the drive into the mirror without a problem.

 

I also have a win 2oo3 box with low budget promise tx2000 raid 1 controller and it runs excellently as well.

 

I image the OS partition of both boxes on a monthly basis and keep the data on a separate partition that is backed up every night.

 

My hardware raid card has one slight annoyance in that it at installation of the card, it only wants to load the raid drivers from a floppy. So I have to have a floppy drive on the server and a few floppies handy to support the card.