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dudeness

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22 years ago

D

dudeness

11 Posts

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13797

January 30th, 2005 09:00

RAID recommendation

Hi

Can somebody recommend a Serial ATA RAID card that I can stick in my Dell 8300 , The motherboard has got two SATA ports on it, and I use one 80Gb SATA Hard drive at the present, so if I get another drive, I can do my own RAID.

Thanks
  • T

    techking

    49 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 30th, 2005 16:00

    In my opinion home users shouldnt use raid configurations. I recommend just buying another sata drive and use them individually. Why you ask? I will tell you. If something goes wrong if you choose a stripe configuration, you will lose ALL your data. Ok, so the disk access is faster, but ask yourself, will i notice the difference as a home user? The answer is no. The other configuration which people use the most is the mirror config. If you store highly important data which cant be backupped on a burnable dvd, then this configuration is ok. If something happens with one of the two drives then you still have the data on the other drive. However, errors that are not hardware related will also be copied to the good harddrive. This can cause a software error from one hdd being copied (mirrored) to the other drive, causing them both to stop functioning. A mirror will in practise only be used by large companies and used for servers which hold large quantities of data. A home user can backup his important (not your 120gB of p*rno) data in most cases. If all the above doesnt apply to you, be my guest and choose a raid config, i think its a bad idea (theres more raid configs btw, these are just the most common ones).
  • S

    Shadow5

    19 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 31st, 2005 01:00


    @techking wrote:
    . . . snip
    I will tell you. If something goes wrong if you choose a stripe configuration, you will lose ALL your data.
    Only if you don't perform regular backups, otherwise not a problem.  I use imaging software daily to backup my system, I keep the images stored on both internal and external drives.
  • D

    dudeness

    11 Posts

    549

    0

    Posted January 31st, 2005 10:00

    Hi


    It looks like my thread has been hijacked.

    Has anybody got an answer to my first post please.

    Thanks
  • T

    talmy

    1034 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 31st, 2005 13:00

    Right here on the Dell website ther is the Adaptec 1210SA, which should work fine. As far as the hijacking is concerned, it is generally true that RAID has limited value for home users. That is why it isn't a big topic of conversation and Dell has been slow rolling it out.

    Listing in Dell.com
  • EJ

    e-Johnny

    17 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 31st, 2005 14:00

    So, I am a little dense here, but doesn't PCI have a bus speed of 33 Mps, and SATA 150?  So, if you use a SATA card, haven't you just lowered your overall speed / thoughput ?

     

  • T

    TomXPS

    1310 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 31st, 2005 15:00

    I think Dell used a Promise card for there RAID solution for the 8300.  Might want to check out the 8300 downloads and see what driver is available that may give you hint at what model RAID controller they used.  
  • D

    Dean_S

    18 Posts

    549

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    Posted January 31st, 2005 17:00

    Suggest that you also look in the section for hard drives.
     
    I just installed 2 Seagate ST3160827AS NCQ 160MB drives with a Promise TX2200 raid controler, as raid 1 on my 8250. Moved my boot drive and data onto that. Much faster than the ATA deathstar 80MB drive that had a noisy bearing. Backing up data does not backup the OS!
  • S

    Shadow5

    19 Posts

    549

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    Posted February 1st, 2005 02:00


    @Dean_S wrote:
     
    Backing up data does not backup the OS!

    If you image the entire drive it sure does, that is what I do for my backups.  I have restored my RAID 0 from these backups so I know the methodology works fine.
  • D

    Dean_S

    18 Posts

    549

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    Posted February 1st, 2005 12:00

    Many backups do not capture all of a bootable image.
     
    What product do you use or recommend for this?
    You boot a DOS program to to the backup and restore?
    You backup to disk?tape?
     
    thanks
  • S

    Shadow5

    19 Posts

    58

    0

    Posted February 2nd, 2005 02:00


    @Dean_S wrote:
    Many backups do not capture all of a bootable image.
     
    What product do you use or recommend for this?
    You boot a DOS program to to the backup and restore?
    You backup to disk?tape?
     
    thanks


    The keyword here is I image my drives, this creates a mirror image of the target drive which can be stored and restored.  Everything comes back, bootable image and all, RAID 0 and all.  You can image the system 'hot' from within Windows XP; a restore of a bootable image requires starting the system from a bootable CD and restoring the desired image from your storage device.  The process is very fast and has proven very reliable.  

    I personally use Drive Image 7 which has been purchased and repackaged by Symantec.  Now it is available as Norton Ghost 9.  I use the 400gb drive on my system to store rolling daily images and an external USB2 drive for daily rotating offline storage of the most recent image.

     

     

     

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