Tekforums

Chat => Entertainment & Technology => Topic started by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 12:25:02 PM

Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 12:25:02 PM
after my hard drive blocks kept air locking I striped the system down.... when I was building it I was carefull to have the hard drives connected up in the right order to make things easier in the future... sata1 at the top, through to sata6 on the bottom...

I was going to number them before I disconnected them.... but I forgot, and now all 6 drives are muddled up :(

me hopes theres some way to fix it :(
Title: Re:6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Eggtastico on December 26, 2006, 12:35:48 PM
are all 6 drives identical?
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 12:40:35 PM
yep :o  6 x 80gig

nice and fast in raid !
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Norphy on December 26, 2006, 13:24:33 PM
Any half decent RAID controller should be able to sort that out for itself anyway.

Unless youre running rubbish on-board RAID.
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 14:06:55 PM
yeah its on-board :s

well fingers crossed and it might be ok :)

I thought about getting a proper hardware raid card... but decided against it thinking the PIE buss tops out at 133mb/sec (iirc) and my on-board sata2 should be capable of 300mb/sec ?

Ill google around later on.... if it doesent sort itself out, hopefully Ill be able to download something so I can connect the drives up one at a time and itll tell me which one is which !

because is not.... theres something daft like 700 different combinations ? (rough guestimate is my head)
Title: Re:6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Serious on December 26, 2006, 15:05:26 PM
6x5x4x3x2x1=720 ;)
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 16:21:47 PM
well either the power if my good looks pilled off a 720 to 1 long shot.... or it sorted itself out automatically :)

(i think ill stick with the idea of the former ;) )
Title: Re:6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Mongoose on December 26, 2006, 18:18:57 PM
lol, lady Luck just cant resist that Knighty lovin
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Norphy on December 26, 2006, 21:46:42 PM
Quote from: knightyI thought about getting a proper hardware raid card... but decided against it thinking the PIE buss tops out at 133mb/sec (iirc) and my on-board sata2 should be capable of 300mb/sec ?

A single PCI Express lane gives you approximately 300MB/sec bandwidth if I remember correctly. Bog standard PCI gives you 133MB/sec shared between all the devices on the bus. However, its not just bandwidth you need to think about, its processing as well. A proper hardware RAID controller will handle all the I/O operations and all of the RAID calculations too. Thats especially important if youre running RAID 5, 50 or 6 (You ARE running RAID 5 (or at least RAID 10) with a six disk array, right?).

On-board RAID Controllers offload all of those calculations to the main CPU while a decent hardware RAID controller (IE an LSI or 3ware one, not a cheap and nasty Promise, Sil or Highpoint one) does it all on the card.
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 22:18:00 PM
nope..... just rair 0 :D

only want it for speed, thats why I went with 6x80gig and not something bigger

have ~600gig of network drives to store all my stuff on :)

I thought the same about the extra CPU cycles needed, but Im running a 5200X2 now, so I didnt think it would make much difference ?
Title: Re:6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Mongoose on December 26, 2006, 22:27:47 PM
like to live dangerously then Knighty?

seriously what on EARTH are you using a 6 disk RAID 0 array for?

I assume you have a reason, but that does seem a tad on the reckless side to me
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: knighty on December 26, 2006, 22:46:44 PM
my reason is...... ZOOOOOOOOM !

niec and fast :)

probably not much better than 4 disks tbh, but I felt like treating myself :)

and tbh, for all the hard drives Ive had, Ive only ever had problems with one... and that was after I accidently put 240v though it :)
Title: Re:6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Mark on December 27, 2006, 01:06:15 AM
I have 4 Raptor 72GB 10k RPMs as RAID0 OS disk myself.
Title: 6 drive striped raid bummer :(
Post by: Serious on December 27, 2006, 03:40:41 AM
Quote from: Norphy
Quote from: knightyI thought about getting a proper hardware raid card... but decided against it thinking the PIE buss tops out at 133mb/sec (iirc) and my on-board sata2 should be capable of 300mb/sec ?

A single PCI Express lane gives you approximately 300MB/sec bandwidth if I remember correctly. Bog standard PCI gives you 133MB/sec shared between all the devices on the bus. However, its not just bandwidth you need to think about, its processing as well. A proper hardware RAID controller will handle all the I/O operations and all of the RAID calculations too. Thats especially important if youre running RAID 5, 50 or 6 (You ARE running RAID 5 (or at least RAID 10) with a six disk array, right?).

On-board RAID Controllers offload all of those calculations to the main CPU while a decent hardware RAID controller (IE an LSI or 3ware one, not a cheap and nasty Promise, Sil or Highpoint one) does it all on the card.

I remember peeps arguing that PCI raid cards were faster than on board raid IDE options a few years ago. When tested by a magazine it turned out they werent any faster at all, quite the opposite.

Providing the chipset is reasonable there should be no problem.