Raiding Sata II 7200 RPM Drives in Windows 7

[OG buckshot jr]

Has anyone ever done it using 7200RPM drives? Is it even worth it? I've got least 5-6 250/320GB drives and I might as well put them to use.... sooooo, raid 'em or just use the extra storage?
Thanks all!

(I'm a RAID noob).

 

[dead mike]

i would think u would be better off selling them and pocketing the money

 

[skd_mrk]

I found that it had a negligible impact on performance (I did this before I bought my SSD) and really wasn't worth the effort.

 

[DrUgZ]

Do you want to raid them for performance or redundancy? I have to say that I would never trust my data with a windows based software RAID array.
If you want speed and redundancy with that number of disks I would suggest going with a RAID 5 array.
RAID 5 will yield you the space of the number of drives you are using, minus 1. so if you have 6 250 gig drives, you will get 1.25 TB of usable space. If one of those drives fails for whatever reason, your data is safe. if 2 fail, you're fucked.
You will notice a significant performance gain with each drive that you add to an array. I have 12 7200 RPM 2TB drives in RAID 6 (# of drives -2 for redundancy) and I get around 650Mb/s transfer rates, and the redundancy of being able to lose up to 2 drives at once without losing any data.

I have a dedicated Adaptec RAID controller that takes care of all of my drives, while software RAID is very efficient in UNIX, I wouldn't bother under winblowze. UNIX OS's are far more stable and rarely need to be restarted or lock up. One BSOD could result in data loss if your drives are being written to or accessed when it happens.

 

[skd_mrk]

I did RAID 0 (striping) for performance since I couldn't afford a SSD when I did my initial build. I didn't see any significant performance versus the single drive setup. If you do raid with the disks just aim for redundancy.

 

[Cock]

I did RAID 0 (striping) for performance since I couldn't afford a SSD when I did my initial build. I didn't see any significant performance versus the single drive setup. If you do raid with the disks just aim for redundancy.

This x5billion RAID 0 looks great on Benchmarks but totally fucking useless in real world apps.

 

[Cock]

Raid 5 would be a decent idea BJ, but get a RAID controller don't bother with software RAID's

Also I've used the hardware RAID card (RAID 1)on my MediaPC (Winblows) for years never had a single issue with it. Even when Windows has crashed (yay IRQ errors) doing a video convert from boot to RAID drive it still works.

 

[OG buckshot jr]

Hmm.... excellent insight all, thank you very much. I believe I'm just going to use the additional storage as I've already got all of my data constantly being backed up on the Mac side of things through Time Machine and an external hard drive (I LOVE Time Machine!). Problem is, I guess, I don't have any data on Windows except for Valve mapping lol Oh well, just thought I'd be taught some stuff.. Thanks all, cheers!