I have two identical SATA drives in my current machine, striped. Works great. Certain functions are noticeably faster than my friends’ machines.
Yes you are increasing your chance of data loss since if either drive goes down, everything goes bye-bye, so take the normal precaution of backing up everything critical. That said I’ve never had a hard drive failure at home.
I wouldn’t be too worried about the motherboard itself dying since (a) I’ve never seen it happen and (b) you can replace the motherboard since the data on the drives won’t be gone.
Also, all the motherboards I’ve seen with RAID0 onboard also support RAID1 and RAID0+1. That might be a bit much for you but hard drives are cheap these days, 0+1 lets you use 4 drives - it’s a mirrored pair of stripe sets, so one pair is a live backup of the other pair. If anything happens to the primary stripe set you reboot and tell it to make the mirror set the primary stripe set, and you’re back in business. Then you’ve got the luxury of replacing the bad drive and rebuilding the failed set.
Read performance should also be pretty amazing that way, since you can be pulling data off of 4 drives at once (write performance will stay the same as a single stripe set though).
Upon re-reading, the one thing I’m not sure about (simply because I built my system as RAID0 from the beginning) is whether you can add the second drive and create the stripe set given that your first drive is already in use. You might have to reinstall everything from scratch (not difficult, just something to consider).
Don’t bother with RAID striping - just mount the second drive and use the space. You can mount the new drive as a subdirectory of the original drive if you wish. If you stripe the data across two drives, and either drive fails, you lose the data (as you realise). If the data is split across the drives, a failure will only kill half the data. And you can move the disks to a new system.
RAID striping gives additional performance but doubles the risk of failure.
And whatever you do, buy a large USB external drive for backup if the data is that important to you.
Bottom line: With only two drives you are limited only to RAID modes 0 and 1. Modes 3-6 need at least 3 drives, and nested mode 0+1 needs at least 4 drives. The drives do not have to be identical, but the amount of total space available for your array will be determined by its smallest drive. It’s all about what you want it for. If you’re looking for the reliability of a dedicated mirror, RAID 0/1 is all you need. If you’re looking for a performance increase as well as fault tollerance and have more drives to spare, then look into the other modes.
(a) you’ve been lucky, or I’ve been getting the wrong Motherboards. I’ve gone through more of them than any other single componant. Never had a Hard Disk die though IIRC.
(b) I was under the impression that when you put the disks into a differant system, you have to recreate the RAID set in the Bios and that wipes the data. Thanks for setting me straight.
I’ve seen all sorts fail. If you’ve only got two drives, then I’d choose mirrorring over striping. You’ll get superior read speed and be able to move the drives to a different motherboard (though probably not as a mirror to start with).
I’ve had one drive in a stripped array get a loose IDE cable, and the data was corrupted, because one was connected and the other wasn’t. I’ve also had it happen and the data was recoverable after remounting. I’ve used two up to four smaller HDs and it was a bit faster, than a single drive. Not having to deal with 40G or 30G HD was a big factor also. I got over a hundred Gig stripped array drive to work with instead. I used it for video editing, so the corruption of a drive wasn’t a big deal. For data I value more, I keep the HD’s seperate. Either add on as a subdirectory or just assign them both a letter.
Make sure to get a namebrand mobo and have a proper power supply - those 400W “Ed’s Bargain Bin” power supplies are more POS than PS. I’m willing to bet that the hard drives will fail more often than many other components due to moving parts if nothing else.
To be fair, I have never actually had to replace a dead mobo however if you swap like for like I don’t see why it’d wipe the data from the drives - setting up RAID in BIOS doesn’t format the drives or anything, it just gets things ready so that your OS will see them as a single drive.
Many RAID controllers require a special driver to be loaded at the beginning of a fresh windows install, it also sometimes will only load those drivers from a floppy drive. Be prepared if you only have one PC.
I would suggest that the likelyhood of a RAID stripe set surviving a MoBo swap depends a lot on the similarty of the two BOISes. Valgard just said, and I agree, that if the BIOSes are the same you’re almost certainly good to go.
I’d like to emphasize that if the BIOSes are different, the odds fall a bunch. The BIOS is what does the striping, and there’s no universal standard on how it gets done, nor any guarantee that next year’s revision to your current MoBo model won’t change it.
Yeah, if I had to swap out my motherboard I’d try and get the exact same model, or failing that I’d look for one that uses the exact same RAID chip (I’m pretty sure that there’s only a few 3rd-party RAID chips in common use). Mine, for example, is handled by the nVidia nForce 4 chipset.
Obviously this is yet another argument for backing up your critical data.
Well I’m convinced. Mirroring it is. Striping just has too much possible risk.
I didn’t know that you’d get double read speed with mirrored drives, but it seems logical enough.
End of the summer when I’ve got spare monies, I’m gonna buy a couple more HDDs and an upgraded motherboard and do that RAID 0 + 1 thing. That’d be ace.