Raid 0 on IDE

[d_stilgar]

If I have two hard drives in Raid 0 on one IDE drive, will I get improved performance? Or will I not because they are sharing the same IDE cable?

Thanks. I'm new to Raid.

[Aero]

RAID is usually associated with SATA drive not IDE. Your SATA should get better preformence but the IDE will stay the same.

[OvRiDe]

RAID is usually associated with SATA drive not IDE. Your SATA should get better preformence but the IDE will stay the same.
Huh??

RAID has been around long before IDE, and 25 years before SATA. For the majority of time its been utilized primarily in the SCSI format.

The question on the other hand is a very good one. It all boils down to the actual interface format. When it comes to a SCSI system, the use of IDs and Channels come into play. If you have a SCSI RAID controller that has 2 Channels, and lets say each channel has 2 drives attached. The controller can only address (read or write) 1 ID (or drive) on a channel at a time, but it can address both channels simultaneously. So if you had a raid stripe across 2 drives on the same channel the performance would be less then if they raid stripe was across 2 drives on different channels. In a 2 drive system you might not see a tremendous improvement, but in some of our production servers where we have 28 drives spread across 6 channels its amazing. Now I don't have as much experience with IDE RAID as I do SCSI RAID controllers, but from practical experience, I believe that IDE will act very similar. By this I mean the IDE controller will only be able to right to 1 drive at a time on any specific controller. So there may be an increase in performance if you stipe them across the primary and secondary outputs of the IDE controller. I guess the big question is ... will there be enough of a performance increase to be noticeable. I am really not sure. Hope I didn't bore ya.. and I hope this helps . Good luck

[d_stilgar]

Ok. I found this (http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT022201021241).

It gives a comparison on two types of IDE and talks about slave and master. I know that an IDE cable has a slave and master part to it. Is that site saying that I can put two drives one one cable and see that performance increase.

If I have them on two different IDE cables, is it still ok to put a DVD drive on too? Or will that slow it down considerably?

Thanks a lot. I really don't know much about raid.

[OvRiDe]

According to the charts it appears that having them on 2 seperate cables and setting the block size to 64K, there is a pretty decent performance increase over having them on the same cable. When you throw the optical drive into the mix I'm really not sure how thats going to affect the overall results. If you have the option to put the DVD on yet another cable I would do that, otherwise you could just try the different configurations and see how it works out for you.

[d_stilgar]

Hmm, I don't know of any boards that have 3 IDE ports on the mobo. I guess I'll have to go to newegg and see.

[nil8]

You can buy PCI IDE raid 0/1 controllers for fairly cheap if you're not planning on booting off the device.

I know enough about raid to get myself into trouble.

Are you going to see a boost in performance assuming 2 drives(ATA100) on a RAID0 config? Probably not. You will just be backing up your data in the simplest way possible.

If you had 4 drives and running RAID5, maybe.

Also, windows has the ability to do software raid. If you're using this and not a real piece of raid hardware, your system will run slower from this, and your data transfers will be slowed too.

[CanaBalistic]

ok im not totaly sure i understood anything above... :)

I do know this:
When i had my hard drive (IDE 133) and my dvd rom drive on the same IDE cable i got crapy dvd quality. The playback was choppy and degraded. aswell it seemed like my computer would lagg when i tried to open a file while the dvd drive was playing a disk (any disk even music). I believe this to be because the IDE 133 transfer rate gets split in half when 2 devices are being used on the same channel. Each gets half the bandwidth. When i got a second ide cable and pluged each device into its own channel i got a drastic improvment in responce time and perfect dvd playback.

When both devices on the same channel are in use they only get half the bandwidth and will give you crappy performance. So lets say for example you had two 10,000 rpm drives on the same channel. They would show less performance than a single 7,200 drive on its own channel.

Thoreticly, the best config for performance is one device per channel

I dont know if this helps or if its completely accurate but i believe it gives some insight

[nil8]

You're on the right path.

As far as I can remember(A+ cert was over 7 years ago), IDE is a switching technology. If your hd is being used, and your dvd isn't, then your IDE bus will 'loan' the extra throughput to the hard drive for use until the dvd requires it.

As for your drastic improvement, that's because each channel is a different part of the bus, so there was no loaning. Both channels in the bus went to the other parts of the computer instead of sharing a single point.

Computer manufacturers use this technique to help prevent slowdown on hard drives because of low memory. Virtual memory is expected to be used, and sometimes often. This is why it's a bad idea to use a $350 dell/hp/compaq/gateway right out of the box. Get some real memory in it or suffer later.

I don't think that helps his raid question. Raid is logical interface work, not necessarily physical like IDE.

I hope someone who actually remembers this stuff accurately can shed some light. I think I'm right, but I've been wrong before.

[Aero]

Huh??

RAID has been around long before IDE, and 25 years before SATA. For the majority of time its been utilized primarily in the SCSI format.




my bad, I don't use it. sorry for the wrong info.

[Cevinzol]

I don't know of any boards that have 3 IDE ports on the mobo.
I have an old Serverboard in one of my machines (Tyan Tiger 200 (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tiger200.html)).
It has 1 PCI IDE controller (4 IDE devices)
plus a Promise FastTrak100 RAID controller (4 more IDE drives - 0,1,0+1 configs).
For a total of 8 IDE devices.
You have to look at serverboards for IDE. SATA RAID controllers are more common on new boards but back then RAID controllers were an expensive add on that most home users didn't need.


If I have two hard drives in Raid 0 on one IDE drive, will I get improved performance? Or will I not because they are sharing the same IDE cable? Thanks. I'm new to Raid.
You can't use a standard controller for RAID. You need a special RAID controller.
Your speed will be limited by the IDE drive seek/transfere times and NOT by the cable/controller configuration.

[d_stilgar]

I found some mobos with more IDE. But instead I found mobos with more SATA and still dual PCIe.

So thanks for all the help. I learned a lot from everyone and did more research, but then I just researched to find a different mobo. Go figure.

[nil8]

Nothing wrong with that. Sounds like you found something that would work better for you.

[Rankenphile]

Exactly. Better to have a long discussion and make an educated decision on your purchase than to end up with something you didn't really want and have to deal with inconvenient workarounds or expensive upgrades down the road.

[Cannibal23]

you didn't really want and have to deal with inconvenient workarounds

Oh common dude. thats what modding is all about. inconvienent work arrounds abound. well maybe not if you plan things out really well but at least im the kind of guy that just jumps in and has to work out solutions as i go allong.