Hardware RAID anyone?

[slug420]

anyone have experience working with hardware RAID?

im lookin to do some on my xp box with 2 WD 80gig drives and these are pretty much my two choices right now
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031028/index.html
duiplidisk3 which sounds awesome but is 250 bucks

or

the Dawicontrol DC-100 Raid which based on
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20021112/index.html
sounds like the best choice for me and is only 85 bucks.....


any help is appreciated.

feel free to IM me on AOL: slug420

 

[toucci]

get a highpoint raid controller, they are the best

 

[RyanJayG]

I've got raid-0, sata raptor drives... they own!

 

[slug420]

i need RAID1, ill checkout highpoint

 

[toucci]

why the hell do you need raid 1?

 

[RyanJayG]

for a server?

 

[slug420]

desktop to mirror my primary drive cuz when i put a new drive in my pc im gonna put 2 in running raid1 so i dont experience the data loss that i did a cple months ago

 

[RyanJayG]

makes sense,,, go with raid 5, spend the $$$$$$$$!

 

[toucci]

If you're gonna waste money, might as well waste a lot! Yeah get raid 5! (lol2)

 

[slug420]

why is it wasting money?

 

[slug420]

and btw, thanks for the feedback, i posted on tomshardware over 24 hours ago and have 4 views and 0 replies, and i got 2 replies here within 45 seconds

 

[RyanJayG]

we are just cooler here, and tom's is notorious for crappy reviews of products, like the company bought it or somthing

 

[toucci]

toms is retarded, say as far away from there as possible.

As for the storage, if you're really worried about your data's safety just get a nice pci IDE card and make sure you're running 33 mhz pci (non overclocked).

Sometimes motherboards' IDE controllers are bad and glitch up. Pci cards are generally more reliable, and a redundant raid setup is definitely overkill for you.

 

[|Thrax|]

Highpoint RAID is not the best out there. Just because most motherboards come with a Raid 0 controller dos not mean it's good. Decent at most. I would get a 3ware card.

A 3ware 7006-2 is a good 0,1 solution.

I would go all the way and get a 3ware Escalade 7506 Series.

http://www.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp

7506-4lp RAID 5.

 

[slug420]

I have a total of 250gigs of disk space, not including my primary, which will now be 2x80gig and my old 80 gig primary had a comlpete failure where it will not boot at all anymore. I already have a IDE controller for 2 of my other drives and a complete mirror is really the only solution that i consider acceptable right now...if I get a raid controller as opposed to the duplidisk then ill probably buy another HD and mirror some more drives too....


RAID5 seems like the additional configuration could give me an unwanted headache and I dont really need additionalperformance

 

[Newf]

I could care less about my main drive with windows xp on it and such. it's the other ones I care for more as they have the important stuff on them. I have an image of my main drive ( ghost ) and if dies, or even if I install something that screws it up......10 mins and it's back up and running. The important stuff on the other drives is backed up onto cdr or DVD, or even copy some stuff to another drive.

For home, I'd rather have the extra drive space that two drives have, rather then wasting it on a mirror. Now for a server.....different story.

 

[slug420]

250 gigs of CDs or DVD is a pain in the ass.......and im on 14.4 dialup at home so i dont need any additional space really but I do need to securely keep all the data I have at this point...

maybe ill get a 40 gig or smaller drive for my OS and use the 2 80s i just ordered for manual backups of data from other drives....


at 85 bucks for a raid controller tho i dont really see how its a "bad" idea if im willing to give up the disk space required for raid1

 

[kc5zom]

Go all the way, get an Adaptec U160 Raid controller, 3 or more Seagate Cheetah 15k RPM drives, and hook that bad boy up. Run RAID5, good performance and there really isn't any extra overhead to it at all. And if a drive dies, all you have to do is swap in a new one and wait about 30 minutes for the RAID to rebuild itself.

 

[slug420]

i wound up getting a SATA 36 gig raptor drive from WD and a promise pci SATA controller

im gonna run rsync through cygwin to keep a backup on one of the 2 80gig0rs i also picked up (EIDE)

i did a plain winxp install....and initially i was having problems with explorer where I would be browsing my drives and all of a sudden explorer would hang and would be using 99% of my CPU and at times up to 500 megs of my RAM

now that has gone away and explorer only hangs when i try to browse a couple of different folders (I have run scandisk on the related drive)

JUST NOW internet explorer has started doing the same thing. where it will appear ot be working really hard thinking about loading a web page and when i look, voila its using 99% of my cpu.

wtf is going on.

im running norton AV with the latest updates. xp SP1, have updated drivers for the SATA controller, and cannot imagine there is any spyware or adware anywhere - at any rate I have had this problem since before i had any applications installed.

im using an Asus a7v8x, athlon 2500xp(or 2400 or 2600 or whatever, its 1.8gz) and 1gb of ram

wtf?

any help is appreciated