Curse you RAID, you tease me with your simplicity, but your simplicity is not so achievable. Let me ‘splain. No, there’s not enough time, let me sum up:
I decided with all the pictures I’m taking for my MFA, that carrying them all around on an 80gb portable hard drive was maybe not the best and most secure option. One unfortunate incident and I’d loose my entire graduate career. I decided that even through our poorness, I should probably invest in some additional and redundant storage. I bought two 250 GB drives and a RAID card to create a mirrored environment. (lets not get into the fact that I could/should have bought SATA drives instead of Ultra IDE, I’ve already dealt with that blunder).
So anyway, Friday night I spent a good 6-7 hours installing the drives and removing an old 30GB drive from the system. In the process, I decided to reinstall windows onto one of the two 80GB drives so the result should have been two twin 80GB drives and on RAIDed pair of 250GB drives, mirroring as one. What I ended up with, was an 80GB drive that was ghosted from the 30GB but wouldn’t boot, the 30GB still installed but sitting outside the case, two 250GB drives in the case, but not connected because windows kept crashing when they were connected, and an 80GB drive with old user data just sitting in there working perfectly. At 4am, I decided it weren’t gonna work and went to bed.
Saturday I got up and got the 80GB OS drive sorted out and was finally able to remove the 30GB semi-permenantly (it still has all the old apps on it, so I’m going to save it as an archive temporarily. I got the system to recognize the to 250s independently, but not as a RAID. I started researching software RAID options. I learned that Windows XP has the capability to do RAID 0 (combining two drives into one drive twice the size and twice the write speed) but not the ability to RAID 1 (combining two identical drives into one drive the size of each individual drive, but mirroring all data onto both drives simultaneously as to protect all data from drive failure). After further investigation I found that Windows Server 2003 had the capability to do both (and some other RAID configurations) and that functionality was actually still present in the stripped down Windows XP, but it was disabled. I subsequently found the instructions to enable that feature.
So now, after almost 14 hours of work, I have a modified version of Windows running two 250GB drives RAIDed together to work as one 250GB drive that is constantly mirrored and two 80GB drive working independently as an OS drive and a spare data drive. I’m considering RAIDing the two 80’s together, but I can’t seem to decide in what manner to do so. If I Stripe them (RAID 0), then I get one 160 GB drive with twice the write speed but no data protection. It would increase productivity in both photoshop and gaming, both of which this computer is primarily used for. If I Mirror them (RAID 1), I never have to worry about HD failure in the system at all as they’ll all be redundant (which might be good since I don’t know what will happen to the two RAIDed 250’s if I have to reinstall Windows).
Anyone understand what I’m saying and have a suggestion of what to do with the two 80GB drives?
4 replies on “”
Well, if the 250s are the ones storing your graduate work – then I’d up the performance of your 80s with RAID 0. However, if you’re still concerned about losing work – go with RAID 1. It’s the reason you bought all this stuff and it’ll help you sleep at night.
I’m leaning toward performance, my only concern is what Windows XP will do with those two 250s if it has to be reinstalled and doesn’t have the “patch” I put in it.
I don’t know for sure, but I think a pre-patched XP should read them as two seperate 250s that just happen to have the exact same data. You could then patch the new XP install to RAID them again.
thats my optomistic theory.