No go on the 3TB Raid

As some may remember, I spent the last few days moving data off of 3TB
of disk in hopes of recombining them into on 3Tb Raid0 array.

Dell released the new drivers that purport to support larger arrays, at
least with Vista (which I installed).

Well, the project was a failure.

It turns out Dell released the drivers, but NOT the ROM update. Intel
doesn't offer it directly, so I am at the mercy of Dell.

I have no faith they will ever release it.

So, back to a pair of 1.5Tb arrays.

The upside is that moving everything off and back did a nice job of
defragging both arrays. Moving files between the two is light years
faster than before. It may also have to do with which drives are in
which array, but I just picked them at random.

Tom

 

Yes Tom, I have found the moving + deleting + restore to be the
fastest defrag and does a better job in the end.
I actually have at times made an image of a partition and then a
restore. Really quick an efficient.

Art

 

Tom, all I can say is I'm glad I don't have to move 3TB of files. I
shrug shoulders if I have to move 30 gigs which is nothing compared to
yours. That's a lot of bytes <g>.

I don't get involved with Raids so right now I'm not too knowledgeable
about them but I think the day might come where I might get involved
for own needs. We'll see.

 

Tom,

I didn't follow the initial thread, so I'm not sure if you're shooting
for capacity or performance, but if it's capacity did you look into the
drobo (http://www.drobo.com/)? I've heard good things about it, but
it's not truly a RAID solution (it's a like a redundant JBOD), although
neither is "RAID-0" considering it's not Redundant. With four 1TB
drives, you get 2.7TB available for data as well as the ability to hot
swap drives and preserve data (similar to RAID5).

 

The word on the HTPC forums that I've read is that the Drobo performance
is inadequate. I don't recall the details but something about dropouts
in performance. Pricey too!

Really I just wanted my Dimension 9200 to do what it should. I can
always take the two arrays and combine them with XP, but then I have a
hardware layer AND a software layer.

TOm

 

Interesting, their transfer rate listed is about 20MB/s which is a bit
low but should be adequate for most functions (as long as it doesn't
drop out).

Well then why use hardware RAID at all? Just combine the four drives in
software. I should probably note, I have no clue if Windows supports
this (but it should, it's a trivial volume manager function). These
days, the performance hit running RAID at the software level is
extremely trivial, or you could get a hardware RAID PCI or PCIe card. I
do agree though, the 9200 should be capable and Dell should get their
act together and publish the update. Right now I'm a little frustrated
that the D420 I got from work actually has 2.5GB but only 2GB is usable.