I need some computer help.
I just bought 2 SATA 150/300 drives to replace my old IDE drives hoping to keep them when I eventually upgrade the mobo, CPU, RAM and video card.
I have a older mothorboard that supports SATA 150 BUT, it seems it is only for RAID 0. I seem to have missed that minor detail in the owners manual when I looked it up and bought the drives. I do have a question as to if I can still use these 2 drives in a non RAID configuration in my motherboard's forum. Hopefully someone will know better than me.
I am really reluctant to do a RAID 0 configuration on my computer because if one drive goes, I lose the data on the other. Can anyone convince me this is OK or not OK and that I should return the drives for IDE ones. I don't think I will be able to convince the wife I need to upgrade the mobo, CPU, RAM and video card, for about $450 as much as I would like to. We just got hit with some house expenses so it may be a hard sell.
RAID 0 is normally a pure "performance" measure. On the other hand, a pair on non-RAID 0 drives mainly represent the ability to have some redundancy (albeit manual). Even so, you can pick up some Photoshop performance by using a portion of the second drive for the ps "scratch" area [Edit > Preferences > Performance]. May I recommend that you look up the numbers for IDE data transfers vs SATA 150 transfers, and then decide which way to go.
I certainly feel that the failure risk with only RAID 0 and no backup/reduncancy is a bit more than I'm willing to tolerate. Keep questioning and then proceed with caution. Good luck. -Art
Most of the SATA controllers I've seen (ones built into the motherboard, not aftermarket controllers) that support RAID also support using them in a non-RAID configuration. Check your motherboard manual for instructions. Sometimes there's a setting in the BIOS that controls whether the controller is used in a RAID configuration or not.
If your motherboard doesn't support normal SATA, I'd be surprised, Frequelt companies adfertise raid0 only, just means that it doesn't support mirroring, or striping, you could still use them as seperate drives.
My day job is as an IT manager for a large company, With our experience with SATA reliability, I'd never put anything I cared about on raid0, least of all my photographic data. In my opinion it's for things that absolutely need performance in accessing, and back it up, nightly ...
Worst case scenario, you can get a decent PCI SATA controller for about 50 bucks, and plug the drive in seperatly, but I'd be astonished if your motherboard didn't let you do the same thing.
I'd plug the SATA drive in now, boot off the existing drive, and verify that you have two happy new drive letters in windows. I'll wager that it works just fine.
If you want performance, you can get two small drives and raid 0 as a scratch/dump drive to work off of but I wouldn't use it for long term storage (more than a single work session). You should consider having some redundancy for your long term and archive storage.
Thanks all for the helpful information. It all helped.
I am not really looking for the RAID performance with this upgrade. The main goal was replacing my current IDE drives that are getting full with larger ones that have more space and also have something wierd going on with them (no virus or worm accoring to Norton).
Bob, that is part of the issue is that the manual is confusing and only states RAID 0. I hope you are right in that there is something else in there where I don't have to use RAID 0.
Chris, I will try what you mentioned. I will keep my bootable IDE drive in, plug in the SATA drives, activate the SATA portion of my bios and see what happens. Hopefully I have 2 extra drive letters which is what I want. Then I can remove the IDE, make one of the 2 SATA drives as my new boot drive. Then comes the fun part of reinstalling everything as a fresh install. If all else fails, I can try to propose the remainder of the computer upgrade to the wife with the current options of upgrades. Maybe I can squeeze those in.
As for all those who suggested I maintain backups, I do backup all my photos on my second internal IDE drive and on DVD discs currently but after this upgrade, I am considering getting a external HDD to replace the DVDs as the stack of DVDs is getting larger as time goes on. The idea of a daily or weekly backup if I went RAID 0 would be too much work for me and I would eventually not do it and something would fail. RAID 0+1 woudl be nice but I don't need that kind of storage or redundacy with what I currently do.
I have learned that lack of a backup backup lesson personally a long time ago and from all the horror stories on this forum.
In a word: Yes! For photo processing there's no need for RAID0 & it's effectively doubled your odds of losing data. I'd either leave the drives as separate volumes (JBOD), or get a plugin SATA RAID card that can handle the type you want. My preference is RAID 5 or 10/0+1. Plus, of course a real backup plan.
I do this stuff for a living (IT, not photography) and can say that yes, you would be absolutely nuts. There is no way, no how that I'd ever let a client talk me into setting them up on a RAID 0. I'd walk away before I'd put my name on the line for that one. Look at it this way - when you double the drives you cut the MTBF in half, so you are effectively doubling your chance of a failure with RAID 0 over having a larger (or faster) single drive.
RAID0 is risky... but having said that... I have had RAID0 on my system(s) for the past three years without issue. If you do this... just remember... backup, backup, backup. I have two networked HD's on my main systems and backup all my photos to each one of the drives... might be overkill... but works for me.
I did RAID zero tests with my motherboards raid controller, the performance pickup with insignificant. I now run my 2 10,000 rpm drives as stand alone drives dividing workload between them via O/S and CS3 settings. Performance gain this way was more obvious and showed in my testing.
I tested raid 0, 1, 10 and 5. Motherboard SATA raid controllers are not great, a real raid card would do better.
I can't say enough about 10,000 rpm drives for speed. As some have mentioned running raid zero is a bit dangerous, but only if one drive dies. by running raid zero every drive you add to the array increases your chances of failure significantly. Daily/nightly backups as Duncan said are a must if you thik the juice is worth the sqeeze.
We just got hit with some house expenses so it may be a hard sell.
