RAID questions, can this be done?

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LanPirate1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2004
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I am mostly a case modder, so I have no real experience with data storage. SSD's have made me rethink some future drive strategies for one of my builds in the fall (win7).

I want a fast SSD for my C: drive, 60-80GB, that I know for sure.

Is it possible to add a RAID 1+0 array of platter hard drives as additional storage to the ICH8 controller? The mobo is an Asus maximus formula.

I need 500GB of RAID 0 and 1TB of raid 1. How many platter drives do I need to achieve this?

I need some additional fast storage, but can't see spending lots of extra money building an SSD raid setup to get that extra storage. I figure a RAID 0 of platter drives should be quick enough to serve up games and media software, with additional RAID 1 space for archival.
 
Well, you can either go with a single ssd + raid 1 storage, or with two platter drives in raid 0 + 2 more in raid 1. Depends on how much 'fast' storage you need. If 80-128GB is enough check out the Intel Gen2 SSD or a 128GB Indilinx drive. If that's not enough check out the WD 640GB blacks. Fast, not very expensive, good for apps, games, os, if you need the space. For the Raid 1 I would wither go with 2 WD Blacks or Seagate 7200.11/12's in 1 or 1.5TB size.
 
Using Intel Matrix RAID, you can mix RAID-0 and RAID-1 on the same two physical drives. However, to meet your capacity goals, you would need to use either the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 or the <6,000RPM "Green" drives on the market. Two 1.5TB drives would allow you to make a 1TB RAID-0 and a 1TB RAID-1 from two physical drives.

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm
 
Assuming my SSD is the C drive, and I have for example 2- 1.5TB drives for storage then all I have to do is install the Matrix Raid program in windows and set up the two storage drives in the array I choose from within windows, correct?
Do I have to enable any raid settings in the bios?
 
No. You must enable RAID in BIOS. You must also configure the RAID arrays in saidsame BIOS.
I do NOT recommend mixing 1+0 with MatrixRAID like this, because performance sucks badly.
 
LanPirate1 said:
So you would maybe recommend a 3 drive raid setup then?
Click to expand...

No, I don't recommend using MatrixRAID with multiple RAID types or anything that isn't RAID1 or RAID0. Performance sucks. It's filesystem-based software RAID.
 
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