Newb guid to setting up RAID (prolly RAID0)?

[Fuzzy]

In your specific case, using the two 360's as sage recording drives, there is really no reason to even combine them.. sage handles multiple drives perfectly fine, and it is completely transparent in use. It would also simplify matters, as well as provide you with a little more fault tolerance (now, if either drive failes, all content is gone).. if kept separate, and one failes, only half your content is gone.

[Oats]

Originally Posted by pgman

Well, it IS a dedicated piece of hardware that plugs into the motherboard, as opposed to the on-board controller - that's what I meant.

I've never used drive spanning - don't even know how to set it up. The bigger issue for me was available SATA ports. My motherboard only has four, and I already have a system drive, a music drive and a Bluray drive installed. To do any kind of DVR array, I needed the external "hardware" controller. Can MS drive spanning make use of the Silicon Image controller? If it can, AND my system performance would be better (or at least the data would be more secure), I'd be inclined to try it.

I've been in the same situation with needed SATA ports and got a similar (probably the same) Silicon Image controller. It is a very good option to add a couple ports.

Drive spanning will work with any controller, as long as windows can see the drive. You go into disk management, convert the disk to dynamic, and then create a spanned volume. This would erase all your data. Maybe in Win7 it would only lose your data on the first drive, but I haven't tried it.

However, like Fuzzy said, Sage works fine with 2 recording drives. So I would agree with him that you should just use them as 2 drives. It is the least complicated solution, which is usually the best. It won't make your performance better, but it will make it less likely that you lose 2 drives worth of data.

Originally Posted by will

A good RAID controller is not cheap, mine is the most expensive single component in my server. But I look at it as the most important thing on my server is the data and I don't want the possibility of one drive failing to cause me to lose everything. Also, when a hard drive does fail I don't want to have to spend 12 hours trying to get a software RAID recovery to work. I purchased the high-end controller so I can remove that aspect of stress from my life.

I you are losing site of what pgman is trying to do. An expensive hardware raid controller or OS change is totally unnecessary for what he wants to accomplish.

It sounds like you are using RAID5 as a backup, which it is not. Most of the people on here who use RAID5 use it for DVD/BD rips. They have the data on the original disks and use RAID5 to hopefully avoid having to re-rip 1TB of data in the event of a drive failure. RAID is not a replacement for backups.

[pgman]

Thanks for the tutorial. I think I will try drive spanning on the next go-around.

For now, my system works brilliantly 95% of the time and, as I said before, I am not terribly concerned about data integrity for the DVR drive. The worst that can happen is we have to go to Hulu, FOX or ABC to watch any shows we lose - the data on the DVR drive cycles about once every four weeks anyway, and the dozen or so shows I have archived on it are backed up seperately.

The only trouble I'm having right now has to do with terrestrial ATSC reception, but that's another thread.

[sdsean]

Well as said previously I don't reall need raid on the storage drives, that be nice but its not a necessity. I was really just looking for better disk performance withought having to go to solid state since that's still outta my price range. . .

And again, the OS drive is really where the perf kills me and b/c I install games and the like, and they usually must be installed on the OS drive, I'm a bit limited. . .

Drive spanning sounds useful though, wonder if Win 7 ultimate has that?

[Fuzzy]

drive spanning won't give you ANY performance increase. It basically lines the drives up end to end as a single long volume.