RAID 0 for Free - Windows XP/2000

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TheCatt
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Post by TheCatt »

Formerly unknown to me, Windows XP provides free software-based RAID 0. I decided to try it out this weekend, as I'm adding a new drive to a machine.

The basic instructions are here.

Overall, it worked very well, except I made one careless mistake and wiped out one entire drive.

Here is a more comprehensive article from a 3rd party, that even has benchmarking results.

Overall, their results indicate that software and hardware RAID 0 setups are almost equivalent in performance, and either is roughly 25-30% better performing than a single drive.
It's not me, it's someone else.
71-1085092892

Post by 71-1085092892 »

R0 is 2 identical HD's, right? Mirrored?
TheCatt
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Posts: 53998
Joined: Thu May 20, 2004 11:15 pm
Location: Cary, NC

Post by TheCatt »

RAID 0 is disk-striping, any # of disks.

There is no data redundancy or cheksums whatsoever. It basically is a way of making (for example) 2 120GB drives behave like a single (and faster) 240GB drive.

In Windows XP, it can be any # of drive partitions combined together, but they all have to be of the same size, or it gets reduced to (# of disks) * (size of smallest partition included)
It's not me, it's someone else.
TheCatt
Site Admin
Posts: 53998
Joined: Thu May 20, 2004 11:15 pm
Location: Cary, NC

Post by TheCatt »

So I RAID'ed up my drives.

Damn they are fast.

CPU usage is up when large amounts of disk access is going on, but damn they are faster reading and writing.
It's not me, it's someone else.
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