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8300 RAID Card or XP Pro Dynamic Disk & Software RAID
Hi there,
I want to get a 8300 with double 120G disks and ideally partition it so that I have system partition and data partitions mirrored and a striped partition to use working with I/O heavy software. As I understand, XP Pro can just do that with "dynamic disks". The alternative is to just get a RAID 1 card and have all mirrored.
- Any pro's and con's, like how bad is performance on the software RAID ?
- I suppose the system get's delivered with a single 120G partition, can I resize that (i.e. PartitionImage) having a RAID Card ? Any problems partitioning hardware RAID disks ?
Thanks for any advice. /S.
MKO
148 Posts
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Posted December 13th, 2003 20:00
Hi there,
I have a 8300 and i use the very fast Western-Digital Raptor (S-ATA 10.000rpm 8Mb cache 36,7Gb) as the windows system disk, i use a second 120Gb S-ATA disk for data-storage (digital video, photo's...).
Since the 8300 has two local S-ATA controllers directly connected to the chipset, these controllers are the best way to connect drives to the 8300. (S-ATA controllers use a 150Mb/sec interface per drive, a PCI RAID controller is limited to the "slow" 133Mb/sec PCI bus) If you need security you can use a software mirror-set with two drives or a stripe-set for extra disk-speed. (the WD Raptor drive is more than fast enough, now even available with 76Gb) I wouldn't recommend to use a PCI card to connect your drives if you want to go for maximum disk-performance. The overhead for software mirror or striping is only a few percent of your CPU.
Good luck.