I was reading about the Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB Hard Drive and a few questions popped up in my mind and was hoping some expert here could answer them :D

1) If I have one of this and 1 of the IDE 7200 rpm drive, can I form a raid 0 array and would it be a good idea or would that be a complete waste (i.e. if the lower rpm drive would force the entire array to run at a lower rpm)?

2) If your other hdd is the IDE one at 7200 rpm (and u dont have them in the raid array) how does one setup the SATA hdd as the primary one (obviously I would want to load my OS, etc on the 10000 rpm drive so that they load much faster)?

3) This drive can take the conventional 4 pin molex power connector (+ a regular SATA cable which come with the motherboards) or the SATA cable (with the power cord) ...which one would be better

[quote author=“Rahul”]I was reading about the Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB Hard Drive and a few questions popped up in my mind and was hoping some expert here could answer them :D

1) If I have one of this and 1 of the IDE 7200 rpm drive, can I form a raid 0 array and would it be a good idea or would that be a complete waste (i.e. if the lower rpm drive would force the entire array to run at a lower rpm)?

2) If your other hdd is the IDE one at 7200 rpm (and u dont have them in the raid array) how does one setup the SATA hdd as the primary one (obviously I would want to load my OS, etc on the 10000 rpm drive so that they load much faster)?

3) This drive can take the conventional 4 pin molex power connector (+ a regular SATA cable which come with the motherboards) or the SATA cable (with the power cord) ...which one would be better

1- There are others who undoubtedly know more, but everything I’ve read indicates you want matched drives for a raid array.

2- Drive assignment, priority is in the system BIOS setup.

3- Just a matter of convienence or esthetics.

1) Don’t RAID drives that aren’t equivalent. I’ve only RAIDed the same model drives together, but from what I understand, if you can do it, the RAID 0 volume will be double the smaller member of the array. Using two different speed drives (if it’s possible on your controller, I don’t know) your array will be limited by the speed of the slower drive. RAID doesn’t just make 2 drives into one logical drive. That’s known as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). Reads and writes are split across the drives. If you save RAHUL.DOC on the drive, part of it is on one drive and the rest on another. This is why if one drive dies, the entire array is considered fucked.

Know that if you are intent on booting off a SATA RAID array, you will need a floppy drive on your PC. XP requires the drivers to be on a floppy during the install. Yes, this is asinine.

For onboard RAID chipsets, it’s not really worth making a RAID 0 array. You don’t gain much speed and you get a big point of failure in return. Add-on cards will generally be faster in RAID 0 and you can do neat things like RAID 5. (good speed, great reliability)

2) There should be a BIOS setting to determine the boot drive.

3) Your choice. My power supply had one SATA-style power jack, so I happily used that instead of a molex for one of my drives.

If at all I get it, I’ll be getting just 1 so the RAID thing is out of the question since there’s no point in spending 200 bucks on the drive and have it run at 7200 rpm. Would I still need the drivers on a floppy in this case?

[quote author=“Drachen”]1) Don’t RAID drives that aren’t equivalent. I’ve only RAIDed the same model drives together, but from what I understand, if you can do it, the RAID 0 volume will be double the smaller member of the array. Using two different speed drives (if it’s possible on your controller, I don’t know) your array will be limited by the speed of the slower drive. RAID doesn’t just make 2 drives into one logical drive. That’s known as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). Reads and writes are split across the drives. If you save RAHUL.DOC on the drive, part of it is on one drive and the rest on another. This is why if one drive dies, the entire array is considered fucked.

Know that if you are intent on booting off a SATA RAID array, you will need a floppy drive on your PC. XP requires the drivers to be on a floppy during the install. Yes, this is asinine.

For onboard RAID chipsets, it’s not really worth making a RAID 0 array. You don’t gain much speed and you get a big point of failure in return. Add-on cards will generally be faster in RAID 0 and you can do neat things like RAID 5. (good speed, great reliability)

2) There should be a BIOS setting to determine the boot drive.

3) Your choice. My power supply had one SATA-style power jack, so I happily used that instead of a molex for one of my drives.

You clearly know a lot about RAID.  Is there anyway you could go through all of them really quick and list the main usage, features, benefits, downsides to each of them? I only know of RAID 0 and 1.  Now I understand how a RAID 0 would work better but I still don’t get why people would do this. I think I understand how RAID 1 works a little (data mirroring being the keyword).  But still could you go over them for clarification purposes.

This website should be good enough to get you started. I read it myself yesterday to get some basic knowledge about RAID.

The only real reason to use RAID 0 is speed. Since the load is distributed across disks, it’s typically faster to read from. If you’re doing something I/O-intensive like video editing, this is fine. If you have this running on a server, you should be kicked in the crotch. Reading and writing is fast, but it’s not fault-tolerent. As I said before, one disk fails and the array is toast.

RAID 1 is mirroring. It’s fast to read (you’ve got two or more copies to read from) but it’s slower to write because you have to write a copy of the data to each drive… that and the fact that you can only effectively use half the disk space you bought. If one drive dies, you don’t lose any data.

RAID 5 is much more complex, but it’s very popular for servers. It requires 3 or more drives. If you have 3 400GB drives, you would end up with a 800GB RAID 5 array. Two drives would be used for data and one for parity checking. Any one drive could die and the whole thing would just take a little performance hit but still keep on going. It’s easily the best combination of speed, fault-tolerence and disk usage.

You can also mix and match. RAID 10 is a RAID 0 stripe made up of two RAID 1 mirrors. RAID 50 is striped RAID 5 arrays, etc. I’ve never actually used any of the other RAID levels, so I have no practical experience with them.

Rahul:  Thanks for the website.

Drachen: Thanks, short and sweet…  :wink:

Drachen, I had one more question for you…is the power supply that you use a Thermaltake W0014?

RAID 1 on the desktop like overclocking is OVERRATED….

RAID 0 might be ok for people squeamish about losing stuff but I’m not sure if people really need it.

I just buy a brand new hard disk every 1.5-2 years and dump everything onto it. Usually within that time the capacity has nearly doubled, the drive is faster and it’s relatively cheap.

RAID 1 on the desktop like overclocking is OVERRATED…. Laughing

RAID 0 might be ok for people squeamish about losing stuff but I’m not sure if people really need it.

Shurly Shome Mistake…. :D