Storage Solutions RAID 0 for Operating System partition to improve performance?

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deltasquare4

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Hi,

I am planning move my Vista x64 to a Striped RAID array to improve performance. Is it safe to keep an OS on RAID 0 in terms of stability?

All the important data will be on another drive. So, if any of the hard drive fails, I will have backup of OS partition, which I can restore quickly.

I also wanted to know if it is possible to copy my current OS partition to a RAID partition. In this way, I will not lose my current OS setup.

Thanks.
 
no. it won't improve performance.

RAID 1 will improve but if one HDD fails, entire data is gone.

NOt sure if you can activate RAID on already partitioned HDD.
 
^^It's exactly the other way around. Raid0 = stripe/span, Raid1=mirror.

Try RAID5. It requires three drives, but stores checksums on a third drive.

Once you create the array, it is treated as a single drive. You can restore and backup like you would a normal drive, unless you have a very old version of the backup software.

Performance improvement in a home environment will be negligible, it may just boot a little quicker but that's about it. RAID0 improves sequential access for large data chunks, at the expense of random seek times. It's actually counterproductive for the way a typical home user uses their machine - with lots of random access and small reads. You can help this a bit with large stripes, but then drive space gets wasted - expect losses of upto 15% with most data for a stripe size of 128kb. at 32 or 64kb/stripe, there is not much improvement in performance and the overhead of software RAID makes the feature decorative at best.

There's still no harm in trying it out and seeing for yourself though, so go right ahead if you can back up everything.
 
@desiibond: I don't want to activate RAID on already partitioned hard drive i.e. my current drive. But, i want to activate RAID on another pair of drives and copy my current partition to RAID partition.

@cranky: Data protection doesn't matter to me as I will soon be moving my data to an external RAID 5 NAS and I will have weekly backup of my OS partition on it. But, as you are saying, performance improvement is negligible with random access, then it is pointless to do so. Then again, I will try it once I get my NAS/Server ready.

Thanks very much for your inputs.
 
Sorry to barge into this thread but could anyone help me with this; currently I am using one of my P4 (1 GB) for data storage of Accounts in Tally and all computers excess from the same system. Thus using a NAS with RAID 1 will be a better option. The data of a company is around 10 to 15 mb. and not more than 5 users access it. Mostly not all access the same company at one time. Or if not NAS what config server should I choose and how much will it cost.
 
From your description, I guess you require a central tally data repository which can simultaneously be accessed from multiple machine. Is it correct?

I don't know how tally data repository works, but, just for 15-20 MB, I would suggest you rather take daily backups on another hard disk or a flash drive, perhaps.

And about the simultaneous data access, you can just share your data directory over the network with read/write access. As I said, I don't know much about how tally stores and handles data.

Hope that helps.
 
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