Page 1 of 1

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 11:21 am
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.

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 11:23 am
by 71-1085092892
R0 is 2 identical HD's, right? Mirrored?

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 1:56 pm
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)

Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 9:01 pm
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.