Seeking technical advice on HDD upgrade.

Hi everyone. . .

I hate to post asking for help on technical matters here, because I really have done a fair amount of research myself on upgrading the hard drives in my current system. I’m kinda looking for the experience and opinions of others here, though.

Back in the 90s, I used to build systems all the time for practically everyone I knew, and made my living in PC service and support. . .but that was some time ago and I guess I’m just a little behind these days.

I built a new machine last year, primarily for gaming as I do all of my actual work on an old near-obsolete Inspiron that Ubuntu breathed new life into. Specs on the desktop are:

ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe mobo
AMD Athlon 64 FX-62
4x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 SDRAM
BFG Tech 7950GX2

. . . and two hard drives I salvaged from my previous machine, an ASUS SK8N mobo with an FX-54 processor:

2x Seagate Barracuda ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA150 HDDs in RAID 0

The desktop currently runs Vista, and I’ve been considering dual-booting it with Ubuntu 7.04 so I can play with apps that my laptop (running 6.06) isn’t quite beefy enough for, and while reading the FakeRaidHowTo at the ubuntuwiki (I think) I decided I was a little leery about trying to set up a dual-boot configuration on RAID 0.

First, a question about RAID 0. Back when I built the SK8N machine, RAID 0 was all the rage, but I have since read from time to time that the performance increase is not all that significant. I’m seriously wondering if I wouldn’t be better served just scrapping the RAID, getting a decent-sized HDD that supports SATA 3.0Gb/s and using that for Vista.

Then I could just take one of the existing 250GB SATA150 drives I have and install Ubuntu there. (I really don’t foresee myself needing any more than 250GB for it.)

Just wondering if any Dopers had an opinion here. I’m open to any suggestions. Would two SATA 3.0Gb/s drives in RAID 0 have a tremendous benefit over one larger one? My system is stable 99% of the time and I’ve never had any difficulty with the RAID. . .but on my old SK8N system I did have one crash that rendered the system unbootable and trashed the OS, so if my performance increase with RAID 0 isn’t that significant I’d sooner not bother with it.

I know this is probably not quite descriptive enough, and I’m not even certain if I’m asking the right questions. Any advice would be appreciated, though.

Thank you!

The only time a RAID 0 is going to show a performance increase is in heavy drive drive use situations. So if a game or app is pulling massive CPU time or ram but few major file moves to HDD, RAID performance increase will be minimal. I personally would rather have redundancy than the speed boost, remember that running a RAID 0 effectively doubles your chance for a major crash because either drive failing will bring down the system.

I’m not big on dual boot systems so I can’t comment on that aspect.

Indeed, redundancy is something I’d prefer over speed. I have two 500gb SATA300 drives in my system right now. I’d intended to put them both in RAID 1, but since I discovered that requires a reformat I decided against it, because I just reformatted a few months ago after a system crash, and didn’t want to go there again so soon. STA300 is plenty fast enough.

Thanks for the responses, drachillix and Mindfield. I think I am going to go with one SATA300 drive for Vista. I don’t think the imperceptible speed boost I MIGHT be getting out of RAID 0 is worth the risk of data loss, and it’s not unheard of for me to push this machine to the hairy edge between performance and stability. =O

And thanks for bringing to mind the fact that RAID 0 is only beneficial in heavy drive use situations, drach. I hadn’t even considered it, but with SuperFetch and a hefty amount of RAM, I see very little drive activity at all anyway. So I seriously doubt I was seeing any benefit at all.

Again, thank you.

IIRC RAID drivers can be loaded during a repair install allowing you to sidestep the need for a reformat. Once that is established you can often use a controller provided app to synch the drives from within windows. With those 500GB beasts it would probably take a few hours but it can be done.

I’d looked into a few alternate ways to RAID the two, including doing it from within Windows, but none of them struck me as being as good or reliable as when it’s done right from the get-go, with the system handling the array at the lowest level. (My motherboard, an Asus A8N32-Premium, has an on-board SATA RAID controller and a specific SATA port for RAID, and I’d rather be able to RAID everything right from the on-board RAID controller rather than trying a workaround.)

I generally tend to keep my most sensitive data backed up on DVD anyway, so losing a drive wouldn’t be a catastrophic failure. With my next system upgrade I’ll probably get everything set up with nice big array from scratch so I can do it right. For now though I’ll stick with extra space. I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with 1.5TB (there are two other IDE drives in the system, too) but, well … it’s there for whatever I guess.