A8V Deluxe - To Raid or not to Raid, that is the question

Current setup:
A8V Deluxe with Athlon 63FX-35
1Gb DDR 400mhz
2 x 200 Gb SATA Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 in Raid 0 (Performance)
XP Home

Primary usage of machine:
Photo imaging etc in Photoshop CS
Web design - Macromedia suite
Listening to my MP3 music whilst working
machine also used in minor area for Words etc...

It is a stand alone not networked..

Questions:
1) Am I wasting resources by using Raid 0 for my needs - would it be
better to sacrifice file transfer speed for the security of Raid 1
instead?

2) Is it possible to run 3 internal 200Gb; 2 as Raid 0 and one drive
as the mirror in Raid 1, or must I have 4 drives for that setup?

3) I have done a huge amount of clearing out of old files and would
normally defrag my drive - this is my first experience with Raid and
am not sure if a Raid Pair can be defragged in the normal way or not.
Is it OK to use the MS defrag that comes with XP Home?

4) Noting the primary use of the machine, should I abandon Raid all
together and reconfigure the two Raid 0 drives as, say C & D?

If 4 above is the recommended option, to avoid the daunting task of
reinstalling large selection of software and data, would it be
possible to 'Ghost' the image of the existing drive pair to the
external 120gb drive whilst reconfiguring and then 'Ghost' it back on
to one of the (now separate) volumes.
IE: SATA Drives = 200Gb with 46Gb progs, OS & data Ghosted on to a
120b usb external

(I have Norton Ghost 9 but not taken it out of box yet - scared stiff
to install it incase I cock it all up again - I tried to install
GoBack but discovered that GoBack doesn't with Raid! Hence treading
carefully this time around!)

Any help suggestions or advice will be very welcome. Thanks
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

Thus spake Donald Gray:

IMO RAID 0 or 1 is overhyped for a standalone PC. RAID 0 will give you
greater STR at the expense of latency but is good for any regular large file
manipulation where RAID 1 gives you data availability which is great if
running a database server for twice the cost of storage space. I'm happy to
use 2 identical SATA discs off a RAID controller in non-RAID mode with my
page file on the 2nd disc in its own dedicated partition. I use DI2002 for
imaging & would consider True Image next time. If your imaging exercise
fails, you could resort to doing a repair install. I'd go with 4. I presume
Ghost can be run from either floppies or the CD without installing it.

More on RAID 0:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10

 

I do, no problem, everything works fine. I have AV8 with two 80GB RAID
0, and one 120GB for backup. I prefer MS defrag to Norton, it is greatly
faster, does a good job, and doesnt move a bunch of stuff to the far end
of the partition.

I bought Ghost 9, but have not installed it. Instead I use Ghost 2003
that came with 9, because I can boot on the Ghost CD and it can handle
the Promise RAID, no problem. I use 2003 so I dont have to depend on the
Windows installation being there before I can run restore. Ghost 2003
works fine with the RAID and NTFS, and boots fast from CD. I dont think
Ghost 2002 works with Raid or NTFS, but 2003 is great. I have not used
the VIA Raid to know about it?

You cannot of course restore a non-raid image onto raid drives, because
that image wont contain the Raid drivers, so no point of trying to boot
from it, it cant. But otherwise, no issue. I did fear RAID would be an
issue for Ghost, but was pleasantly surprised to discover the AV8 Promise
Raid is NOT any issue for Ghost 2003.

The only "issue" I saw is that I put system disks as RAID on the Promise
controller, and put the one backup disk on the VIA controller. I backup
frequently to it, with the idea that everything doesnt fail at once. The
VIA controller wants to be disk One, but there is a BIOS setting to
switch the order, to be able to boot from the other disk, which is my
system disks. This switch works fine normally, but if you might boot the
XP floppy, like to install on another partition, or install XP64, etc, it
doesnt see this BIOS swap. It still sees all drives (after F6 to load
RAID from floppy), but sees a different drive order. Then I worry if
installing onto G: will then work as F:? Dunno, so I just unplug power
on the backup drive and reboot, and then no issue. However that means I
have to reconnect and then go back into the BIOS and reverse order again
at completion. This maybe only happens a couple of times in my life, but
a minor nuisance anyway, extra steps.

 

[]

Thanks for the comments Paul and for the link.

'Tis a steep learning curve...
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

[]

Thank you for the effort put into the reply Wayne - given me much food
for thought. You have given me son encouragement to dig deeper into
this. Even though I have a 64 bit processor, I don't want to try beta
stuff just yet - not until I feel comfortable with messing with raid.

With my primary usage being photo manipulation with Photoshop CS,
would I notice much difference in timing if I either change to raid 1
or even change to non raid config and have 2 separate 200Gb drives "C
& D"?

Many regards...
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

Yeah, I installed the XP64 beta, just to see it. Wasnt there long, but I
dont notice much difference, except my old Dos stuff wont run now. I had
no problem installing it, there are beta 64 bit Promise RAID drivers
available (used at F6 key from floppy). But it still needs several other
drivers, video, SCSI, scanners, printers, PCI parallel/serial cards, etc.
When XP64 is released, I fear it will like early NT again, in regard to
no third party drivers available.

I dont know how to answer Paul. Raid 1 is probably very slightly slower
than one drive, but you get the reliability of two copies. One disk can die
and you can recover. If either disk dies in Raid 0, we're out of luck, but
that's what Ghost backup is for, so restore shouldnt be any special problem.

Raid 0 seems fast, but not awesome, I'm not really sure of any speed
difference. I have not run any bench marks. With a AMD 3500+ CPU, I just
now timed Photoshop opening a 48 bit TIF file - 90 MB in 3 seconds (until
the profile boxes came up). That's not impressive, only about half of the WD
Caviar WD800JB theoretical, I dont know where the rest went. Photoshop
probably got some of it.

My Raid was easy to install, but I really miss being able to boot on a
floppy and use a small text editor to fix things. With either of RAID and
NTFS, there are essentially no possiblities. I said I had no trouble
installing XP64. Not quite true, but it was my fault. When I downloaded
it, they sent an email with the long complex Product Code. Like a dummy, I
forgot to print it. I got into the install and needed it to continue, but
couldnt. I needed to boot to show the email text file, but at that point, I
couldnt boot regularly with Dual Boot, as Boot.ini was modified to allow
only the XP install to restart. Ghost can boot, and it can access RAID and
NTFS, but only from Ghost to do what Ghost does, but not from the command
line, so there are no edit/view capabilities. I tried the XP CD R restore
mode, but only its limited command list can run, like DIR and TYPE. No
editor. No other programs can run. And it will only access the disk root -
it wouldnt allow me to access \Program Files where the email In Box was to
even use TYPE. Intentionally made too stupid to use.

So no go all around. I went to another computer to download it again, and
they send a new email Product Code before the download started, so I could
abort it, and that worked OK. Good thing.

Maybe what I need is some way to boot a minimal real XP from a CD. I guess
that might be possible, and I should investigate. Otherwise I think there
is much to be said for non-Raid and FAT32, so a Dos floppy can do something.
Not needed often, but really needed now and then. Wish now I had done it. I
keep my fingers crossed.

 

[]

[]

Really appreciate the time you have taken with the response again
Wayne. More food for thought... I guess, when you boil it all down, my
main concern is data loss. In raid 0, two drives halves the MTBF and
one failure all data is lost. Hence my backup worries

Raid 1 cures that but at the cost of both drives being constantly
under stress. No raid and 'Ghosting' the image seems to answer that
and with Norton Ghost 9, it would appear incremental backup is
possible - (I Need to read the Manual more closely for that!)

Thanks again for your efforts Wayne.
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

I did consider that briefly, but if only one disk, and it fails, that's
exactly the same problem too. We've always lived with that, and it is
the purpose of the Ghost backup, to solve that case. I guess I'm saying
does it really matter if the failure occurs in 2 years, or 3 years, or 4
years? We cant know when in any case, and we might have a new
computer by then anyway. Regardless, we better have the backup.
And if we have it, then failure is not such a big deal, a nuisance, but
not a big problem, easily solved, when and if necessary. In every case,
we still must buy a new disk.

But yes, RAID 1 really excels then - stick in one new disk and restore it
from the remaining good disk (I've never done that, but the CTRL F access
to Promise RAID BIOS appears to have the tools for it).

But what is really the difference in that, and restoring it from a Ghost
image? The answer is a perhaps few days of data since last backup. I
have a little batch file with several xcopy lines that I run every day,
sometimes twice a day, to copy current data directories to the backup
disk, anything halfway important in a daily way. It uses the /D switch
to only copy if newer, so it is real fast. The batch includes some
delete *.* lines for temp directories too. Then I run Ghost typically on
weekends. So I think I have those couple of days well covered too.

My little batch file above is pretty much an incremental backup .

Incremental was important when we used slow tape drives, back when backup
took hours, or overnight. Even incremental was a headache then. But
Ghost saves the entire partition in a few minutes, so the time really
doesnt seem much factor. Seems better to have the ability to boot on an
empty new disk, to restore it.

I only backup two partitions. One is XP and all program stuff, all the
daily records, etc. I use the Maximum compression setting, and it takes
15 or 20 minutes (but I do keep a tidy disk, I disable System Restore and
other such clutter). The other partition is archived stuff, mostly zip
or compressed images or compressed music or compressed PDF, mostly all
that kind of stuff. Swap file is there too, it seems to help
fragmentation. Since this partitions data is already compressed, I use
the lesser "High" compression setting, and it flies, maybe 3 or 4 minutes
(even though its twice as big).

However, it is true that the way I infrequently access the disk hard,
that RAID 0 doesnt really seem so helpful. Its fast, but so is one disk.
With regard to emergency access, just the fact that it is any kind of
RAID is still a nuisance for anything other than Ghost (however NTFS is
very nearly the same problem too).

 

You'd be better off just using the two disks seperately. If you have any
massive multi layer images, you would probably appreciate having the
photoshop scratchdisk on another drive, as well as your windows swapfile.

I doubt you need RAID1 if you do backups of whats important (and we all do
that, right?)...

No, you'd need 4 drives, but thats where RAID5 comes in...

With RAID 5, you essentially have 1 drive performaing the redundancy and the
others for space.

Good point. I dunno. I highly suspect that it would be fine to use that
defrag - the RAID controller should sort out any of the issues. Basically
the beginning of the RAID partition is the beginning of both drives,
interleaved.

That would be my guess. With RAID 0 you lose some flexibilty and increase
the risk of data loss (all data is lost if one drive fails), without
significantly increasing... well, anything.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

(link of the day)

RAID 0 only really seems to gain you IOs per second, but you are not really
going to exhibit that pattern of usage.

Should be fine. But hopefully this is covered in the other replies as I;ve
never tried it.

Ben

 

Perhaps a different set of tests were required:
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/515/1

Maybe it IS worth it.

Ben

 

I do use layers quite extensively. Usually only about 5 - 10, but have
done a couple where the layer count went up to 3 figs, especially
creating maps and adding street names!

Thought of that but discounted because of cost...

That is what I suspected. The machine is a v hot machine and came
with raid 0 as standard Soon discovered that I couldn't run GoBack on
a raid 0 (or any raid for that matter)

Ben, Thanks for the valuable input to my query. I have printed out
yours and Wayne's replies and put them in the project file. I will not
be doing any changes until I have collated the various thoughts and
ideas AND that I fully comprehend what I need to do and in what
sequence!

Regards & thanks

--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

[solid gold snipped]

Wayne, I have printed out your replies and have put your thoughts and
guidance in the project file. I will pause for further thought and
learn a bit more about Ghost and Raid before I cock it up big time!

I am inclined to bite the bullet, do one last copy/past jobby on the
'My Documents' then wipe both drives, unhook them from raid and set
'em up as C & D and reinstall OS et al !!!!

Thanks for you help


--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

[]
Wayne
After giving serious thought and consideration to yours and Bens
comments and advice, I have decided to ditch RAID 0 and opt for
conventional drives C & D.

All I want to do is to set up the two drives as C & D with XP Home
sitting nicely on C

I have followed the various links given in an attempt to learn a bit
more about RAID etc - I think I understand the WHAT raid variants do
BUT I am at a loss as to understanding the actual METHOD and HOW it
works. ("Drivers in the raid disk image" etc)

I have been doing a lot of reading and apart from a beaut headache, I
seem to be more confused than ever.

I am not sure of the meanings of all the terminology or methodology. I
am thrown by some of the ambiguous wordings - most articles I have
read assume that the reader is fully conversant with it!

However, I don't think it really matters that I don't fully understand
the actual method of setting up RAID if I am going to abandon it. That
said I want to proceed with caution incase the raid 'images' on the
disks need removing/deleting or otherwise sorting out before I can use
the drives in the configuration I want.

My two HDDs are Maxtor DiamondPlus9 200Gb SATA/150 drives currently in
Raid 0 and with interleaved data thereon. I am backed up so I don't
care about loosing data on those disks. I have made the driver floppy
as per page 5-33 in Asus A8V manual. I am not sure if I will need it
but it is on hand incase.

Can I still use Promise 20837 sata_raid 1 & 2 connectors or should I
use sata 1 & 2 with the Via asic?

Do I need to 'delete' the raid 0 array? - Will this allow the computer
then to see the drives as two separate entities where I can use the
XP Home (sp2) disk to "format C/ S" and "Format D/"?
OR can I just be brutish and force a Format C /S on it?

I guess I am at a loss as to the method of getting the computer to
'see' them as 2 conventional sata drives.

What bios settings will I need to change?

Any pointers will be valuably gobbled up. Appreciate your help.
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

After giving serious thought and consideration to yours and Bens

You don't need to delete the RAID array if you move the
drives to a different controller. I recommend moving them
to the VIA SATA controller, boot off the Windows XP
CD and press the F6 key when requested and then press the S
key to install the VIA SATA drivers that you copied to a floppy
disk. Windows will then let you choose which drives you
would like to partition and format before installing.
No BIOS changes are needed.

Good luck.

 

Hi Kevin - Thanks for the info. I omitted to mention that I was able
ONLY to make a floppy of the Promise 378 disk as per 5-33 . I was
unable to make a floppy for the Via Sata. (there was no CD Support
disc all the 'drivers' were in a subdirectory on the hard drive from
the machine's manufacturers - it is not a hand made machine but a
ready made from Mesh Computers in the UK) There was no file
Makedisk.exe for Viaraid.

Unless I can get hold of a mobo support CD, I feel that I may have to
stay on the 378 sata_raid 1 & 2 connectors.

Can I achieve what I want by doing so?
Thanks
--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

All the VIA drivers are online at http://www.viaarena.com
so it shouldnt be any problem. There are also user forums there.
( This is a link from http://www.via.com.tw/en/ )

 

A truck load of thanks for that Wayne

--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

I have spent over an hour trawling this site - what a wealth of info.
Thanks for pointing me there

Not had time to visit yet!!!! Too busy downloading stuff from other
site and printing out instructions, background info and history -
fascinating....

--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

I had forgotten how potent (and fast) batch files can be. It is
years since I wrote any batch files and had virtually forgotten them
as not relevant to modern OS like XP etc. How wrong could I be!

At your timely reminder, I have written a simple batch file to back up
all 20Gb of "My Documents" to may hard drive.

I have several corrupt file where the batch file locks up for 3 - 4
minutes before giving an I/O error and halts. However it un backed up
data copies at a rate of 1.4Gb in 80 seconds on my setup - more than
acceptable...

I have used /S /e /d switches
I know Echo on will probably slow it down some but it is comforting to
see the files stream by!

Q: Have you managed to get the batch file to accept a space in the
root file name? If so how?

The batch file below assumes that dos is already in "My Documents"
directory - hence the last line to put it back there after traveling
through all the other subdirectories...

================
Echo on
xcopy *.* g:\MyDocuments\ /d /s /e
cd c:\documents and settings\Donald Gray\My Documents\
===============

In the middle line, I have had to remove the space between 'My' and
'Documents' or else I get the dos 'too many parameters' error.

Q: do you know how to alter the dos watchdog time-out timer that kick
in the I/O error? (I have to wait 3 - 4 minutes whilst dos is thinking
on what to do with a corrupt file it is trying to copy.)

You are dead right about it being an incremental back up system.
Perhaps we should patent or copyright the code and sell it at a vast
over inflated cost and make a fortune... In our dreams....


--
Donald Gray
Putting ODCOMBE on the Global Village Map!
www.odcombe.demon.co.uk
You do not have to email me, but if you wish to...
Please remove the SafetyPin from my email address first
Thanks

 

I use the /s /d /y switches. I think if you use /e, then /s is redundant,
but wont hurt of course. Echo echoes the command line. The file names
that are copied will be echoed anyway, without echo.

I backup to multiple places, the backup disk, or to the 2nd computer with
UNC name, etc. So I name my batches with names like copytog.bat to keep
them straight.

Yes, no problem, just put quotes around that path. Like:
xcopy *.* "g:\My Documents\" /d /s /e

The quotes tell "dos" that this is one parameter, instead of letting the
blank begin an additional parameter as is normal.

I'm sorry, I dont know about the I/O error.. I dont think I have ever seen
that. That seems something that should be addressed. Maybe run
Chkdsk/scandisk, or rewrite those files?