Best RAID Setup for this Computer

[Duane]

Hey guys,

I'm finishing up my computer, hopefully, this weekend. It's an Athlon XP 3000 w/ 1gig, 2-512meg sticks of Kingston Hyper X 3200. Through a series of events I have the following hard drives at my disposal:

2 - 200gig
2 - 120gig
1 - 80gig
1 - 60gig
1 - 40gig
1 - 20gig

I've got four HD specific bays along with spare 3.5 and 5.25 bays. So I can probably fit six of the drives in the case.

The main use of the PC will be to do some video capture as well as play games and store/burn DVDs.

Computer guys, what's your recommendation? My initial thought is to do a RAID 0+1 configuration with the four largest drives and put my OS one of the smaller drives.

 

[BulletBob]

Hey guys,

I'm finishing up my computer, hopefully, this weekend. It's an Athlon XP 3000 w/ 1gig, 2-512meg sticks of Kingston Hyper X 3200. Through a series of events I have the following hard drives at my disposal:

2 - 200gig
2 - 120gig
1 - 80gig
1 - 60gig
1 - 40gig
1 - 20gig

I've got four HD specific bays along with spare 3.5 and 5.25 bays. So I can probably fit six of the drives in the case.

The main use of the PC will be to do some video capture as well as play games and store/burn DVDs.

Computer guys, what's your recommendation? My initial thought is to do a RAID 0+1 configuration with the four largest drives and put my OS one of the smaller drives.

It depends if you have a token ring or fiddi connection. I'd use super-iSCSI, Ansi-standard, ODBC compliant, Raid 5 over-striping, assuming you have a disaster recovery backup site.

If not, I'd go with a Raid 3 utra-firbe sonnet ring, cross-strap configuration with a 5-zone fabric switch into your SAN, using BMC Patrol to set up the zoning.

 

[BrAinPaiNt]

I really do not know why you would want or need to use the RAID for just video capture and gaming to be honest.

It seems like too much money and time for just doing that to me.

I do not know why you would need more then 2 HDs...especially at the size of some of those you can just partition them to smaller drive sizes for backups.

I have a 13 gig HD (older one) and an 80 gig hardrive....I split the 13 gig for my main OS on one section and other software on the other section of that small hardrive.

Then I took the 80 gig and split it into 3 sections....2 30 gig sections and and a 20 gig section.

It is plenty of room for me and I have a huge collection of movies and clips on one section....an enormous selection of MP3s (a few thousand) on another section and then another section I have backup of every program and drivers (I would copy whole software CDs incase I would lose a cd to some hardware or software).

Besides the price saved in doing this I also save time on doing disk scans and it really saves time when doing Defrags.....it takes long enough to do a defrag on a 10 gig section let alone on a whole 100+ gig HD.

Also what you may wish to do since you have the extra HDs.....learn how to use Nortons Ghost program...which you should be able to do from one or two floppies without installing the actually program to your hardrive (because nortons that is on your computer normally slows down the computer esp the Nortons Utilities or system works).

So you can get the boot disk and nortons ghost (on floppies) and when you wish to back up some info or your hard drive you can attach the hard drive as a secondary HD to the one you want to copy...boot up the nortons floppy and copy the whole HD in a matter of minutes....take out the HD and store it somewhere so it would not get fried in the computer if something were to happen.

The only problem with this is depending on how many times you would need to backup the hard drive.

We used the ghost program at work and it was a great tool for us because we set up one hard drive loaded with everything we needed...and then ghosted about 20+ other hard drives for the other computers....after that all we had to do was change the individual computer number in the network settings and it worked like a charm.....saved us a huge number of hours instead of having to load all the hardrives from scratch with software.

 

[Duane]

It depends if you have a token ring or fiddi connection. I'd use super-iSCSI, Ansi-standard, ODBC compliant, Raid 5 over-striping, assuming you have a disaster recovery backup site.

If not, I'd go with a Raid 3 utra-firbe sonnet ring, cross-strap configuration with a 5-zone fabric switch into your SAN, using BMC Patrol to set up the zoning.

Thanks BulletBob but that was all pretty much Greek to me. I'm a full time Financial Analyst and mess with the computers in my spare time on a small time scale. This is my first experience with using RAID. My mobo has the function and thought I'd use it since I have the abundance of HDs. Here's the link for the mobo:

http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 2.0).htm

Brain,

As far as all the HDs here's the story:

The 20, 40 & 60 gig HDs are from computers I had or were given to me, my folks have a small business and have given me several of their old PCs. The 80 was on my last computer, WD sent me a replacement. It died and in the mean time I bought 120 gig HD. Fry's had a sale on them and I bought another one for $80 and may use it for my UltimateTV upgrade. I initially bought the 200 gig HD to store some of the extra on the 80 gig HD but it, the 200 gig, failed before I could transfer anything. Well Hitachi sent me a replacement, for the 200 gig, but it was stolen at the apartment complex (someone else signed for it). So I was at one point with basically several old drives, the 20-60 gigs, and the two 120s. Hitachi sent me a replacement for the replacement that was stolen. So I now how have two 120s, the old HDs and one 200 gig. Evidently their tech support screwed up and a month later I had another 200 gig HD along with the replacement 80gig. So that's the reason for all the drives.

 

[adbutcher]

I really do not know why you would want or need to use the RAID for just video capture and gaming to be honest.

It seems like too much money and time for just doing that to me.

I do not know why you would need more then 2 HDs...especially at the size of some of those you can just partition them to smaller drive sizes for backups.

I have a 13 gig HD (older one) and an 80 gig hardrive....I split the 13 gig for my main OS on one section and other software on the other section of that small hardrive.

Then I took the 80 gig and split it into 3 sections....2 30 gig sections and and a 20 gig section.

It is plenty of room for me and I have a huge collection of movies and clips on one section....an enormous selection of MP3s (a few thousand) on another section and then another section I have backup of every program and drivers (I would copy whole software CDs incase I would lose a cd to some hardware or software).

Besides the price saved in doing this I also save time on doing disk scans and it really saves time when doing Defrags.....it takes long enough to do a defrag on a 10 gig section let alone on a whole 100+ gig HD.

Also what you may wish to do since you have the extra HDs.....learn how to use Nortons Ghost program...which you should be able to do from one or two floppies without installing the actually program to your hardrive (because nortons that is on your computer normally slows down the computer esp the Nortons Utilities or system works).

So you can get the boot disk and nortons ghost (on floppies) and when you wish to back up some info or your hard drive you can attach the hard drive as a secondary HD to the one you want to copy...boot up the nortons floppy and copy the whole HD in a matter of minutes....take out the HD and store it somewhere so it would not get fried in the computer if something were to happen.

The only problem with this is depending on how many times you would need to backup the hard drive.

We used the ghost program at work and it was a great tool for us because we set up one hard drive loaded with everything we needed...and then ghosted about 20+ other hard drives for the other computers....after that all we had to do was change the individual computer number in the network settings and it worked like a charm.....saved us a huge number of hours instead of having to load all the hardrives from scratch with software.

I agree with Brain. Instead of doing a Raid, I would build a file server.
There are some free software that would allow you to accomplish this.

For starters try this one-->Here

 

[BulletBob]

Thanks BulletBob but that was all pretty much Greek to me. I'm a full time Financial Analyst and mess with the computers in my spare time on a small time scale.

Yep - Greek to me, too. I guess I picked the wrong week to stop chugging Nyquil.

 

[SweCowboy]

Hey guys,

I'm finishing up my computer, hopefully, this weekend. It's an Athlon XP 3000 w/ 1gig, 2-512meg sticks of Kingston Hyper X 3200. Through a series of events I have the following hard drives at my disposal:

2 - 200gig
2 - 120gig
1 - 80gig
1 - 60gig
1 - 40gig
1 - 20gig

I've got four HD specific bays along with spare 3.5 and 5.25 bays. So I can probably fit six of the drives in the case.

The main use of the PC will be to do some video capture as well as play games and store/burn DVDs.

Computer guys, what's your recommendation? My initial thought is to do a RAID 0+1 configuration with the four largest drives and put my OS one of the smaller drives.

Ok. I would not use Raid if you're going to put six drives in one case. Hard drives generate quite a lot of heat and they get even hotter if they use Raid. Also if one of the raided drives (I'm guessing using "stripe" mode) goes down then all the information is lost. This happend to a friend of mine who lost a great deal of information.

As BP stated Norton Ghost is a very nice little program. Working at a Internet Café its really great if you have alot of similar computers that has the same setup, you just make a complete copy of you're hard drive and copy them to all the computers, then only have to change the individual settings (cd-keys, network address and so on). Its also usefull if you mess around a lot with you're computer and has a lot of HD space since you can basically copy a basic installation to a different drive or partition and instead of reinstalling everything it only takes an hour or so to "reset" the computer to the "basic" installation.

If you have a lot of spare computer parts then you could build a simple fileserver quite easily. You would of course need some networking parts as well, at least a switch/router and some cables as well (you might have that already). But there's really not much advantage to this if you're not using several computers allready.

 

[Duane]

Ok. I would not use Raid if you're going to put six drives in one case. Hard drives generate quite a lot of heat and they get even hotter if they use Raid. Also if one of the raided drives (I'm guessing using "stripe" mode) goes down then all the information is lost. This happend to a friend of mine who lost a great deal of information.

As BP stated Norton Ghost is a very nice little program. Working at a Internet Café its really great if you have alot of similar computers that has the same setup, you just make a complete copy of you're hard drive and copy them to all the computers, then only have to change the individual settings (cd-keys, network address and so on). Its also usefull if you mess around a lot with you're computer and has a lot of HD space since you can basically copy a basic installation to a different drive or partition and instead of reinstalling everything it only takes an hour or so to "reset" the computer to the "basic" installation.

If you have a lot of spare computer parts then you could build a simple fileserver quite easily. You would of course need some networking parts as well, at least a switch/router and some cables as well (you might have that already). But there's really not much advantage to this if you're not using several computers allready.

Thanks guys.

I think I'm going to can the RAID idea for now. I do have a case with plenty of ventilation though, two 120mm fans:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-129-144&depa=1