Can you raid sata and IDE?

[370forlife]

ummm...not much more to say. The title says it all.

[PM650]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

Only if the board manual explicitly says it can, otherwise no.

I just checked the manual for my 4 year-old asus a8n-sli and it apparently supports this feature. ide + sata combined raid will be a function of the southbridge supporting it, unless the ide is from another chip capable of supporting raid.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

Promise made a RAID card with two SATA ports and one PATA port.
It was specifically designed to RAID SATA and PATA together.
http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=107

[stevo1210]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

I've never seen anything like this done before. But, I guess it depends on the motherboard you are using. But as PCBONEZ suggested, get a SATA+IDE RAID card, best option I guess.

[bgavin]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

I have a Promise 2-channel IDE RAID card in a client machine. Not my choice, as I inherited the system when I took over the support.

RAID-0 is mirroring, which is all you can get from a 2-drive system. When the system needed to be recapped and rebuilt, I split the array into two separate IDE drives. IMO, this installation was better served by having a GHOST image of the primary drive and regular backups.

SATA lends itself nicely to RAID in all the flavors, if your hardware supports it. The Intel ICH-xR (R suffix) southbridge is indicative of RAID support. Note this is software RAID... letting Microsoft handle your striping, etc, is bullshit. YMMV. IMO, one should use a reliable high quality hardware RAID controller, not the Intel + Microsoft software solution.

RAID is well published as to pros and cons of the various flavors. Some flavors such as RAID-5 are ideal for improving read performance, such as for web sites. You get redundancy plus higher read performance at the expense of slower write performance.

[zandrax]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

@ 370: software raid allows this: a driver access to all discs and build a big voulme on them; the only requisites are the use of supported controllers (if the OS can't see the controller, it can't access the disc[s]) and a bit of computing power (parity check and CRC control are done in software, so it's load on the cpu).
For linux there is the md driver, in Windows it's called Dynamic Discs and it's officially available only on Server versions (unofficially you can unlock the drivers on 2000/XP and I think they're hackable on Vista too).

PCBONEZ' Promise TX2 and bgavin's chipset raids (e.g. Intel ICHR) are called "fake raid" because they need a driver such as the software one (cpu load has the same magnitude of order), the firmware of the controller joins drives like in an hardware raid and moreover, if the controller dies you must connect the drives to a compatible controller (usually same brand, same model and same firmware revision; Intel ICHR family share the same driver so all raid chipsets are compatible between each other, but this is an exception to the rule). Chipset raid has the disadvantages of both software (cpu load) and hardware raid (raid is controller dependent) with none of their advantages (respectively controller independency and lower load for better performance): that's what "fake" means

@ bgavin: Raid 0 is striping, Raid 1 is mirroring: I wonder if Raid 0 is a real Raid since it lacks the R of redundancy.
I agree on hardware raid, but it's still an expensive solution: a good SAS/Sata controller with a decent onboard processor and some cache costs at least 300 euro ($400).

Zandrax

[bgavin]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

Agreed on striping as RAID-0. My error.

Still useless. It might be somewhat less useless if split among two busses capable of simultaneous access. Otherwise, the 2nd device has to wait until the 1st device frees the bus. IDE cables are not party lines.

I had one Netware machine that I installed years ago as a mirrored pair. Mistake. The OS took a crap and scribbled all over the drive. Since it was mirrored, it scribbled all over both drives. Both were exact copies of junk.

Windows is well known for going brain-dead, BSOD, etc. I just cannot see how I could trust something this unreliable to stay alert enough to avoid scrambling my data. Every disk operation has the potential for a Win failure. I only back up once daily, so that leaves a lot of room for damage. No thanks.

I've done a lot of server installs in the big shops, and we always have Proliant servers with hardware RAID. The shops want RAID-1 (mirroring) for the System partition, and RAID-5 for the data partition(s). This is also the Microsoft best-practice recommendation.

[gdement]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

RAID-0 is effective if the drive interface is faster than the performance of the physical disks, which is usually the case. The user just has to understand it's not reliable for long term storage.

However, I've never found a use for it personally. Even for video capture, I find one dedicated drive is fast enough and keeping the 2nd drive separate is better for input/output operations, like rendering a large video edit process. Massive input file on one drive, massive output file on the other is much faster than the drives having to bounce between 2 files on the same disk.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

>>> Mistake. The OS took a crap and scribbled all over the drive. Since it was mirrored, it scribbled all over both drives. Both were exact copies of junk. <<<

Hardware or Software RAID isn't going to matter in that case.
If the OS is writing junk to the drives it's writing junk to the drives.
-
Purpose of RAID is to save you from a drive failures, not OS problems.

~~~

I've never had a use for RAID-0 either.
Other than heavily loaded servers or maybe gamers I can't see a practical use.
-
From what I've read capturing in HD uses up to 8 GB/hr disk space. (Usually less.)
8 GB/hr -> 2.2 MB/sec.
--- Not even stressing a drive.

[gdement]

Re: Can you raid sata and IDE?

From what I've read capturing in HD uses up to 8 GB/hr disk space. (Usually less.)
8 GB/hr -> 2.2 MB/sec.
--- Not even stressing a drive.

lossless is worse than that, but still manageable at least with DVD resolution.

I can't remember for sure but I think I used to get ~30-40GB/hr with huffYUV (lossless compression) in 704x480. Completely uncompressed would be 29MB/sec, or 102GB/hr.
HD resolutions would probably need RAID-0 to reliably capture lossless, even with huffYUV. But I'm not sure how many "dumb" HD capture cards are even out there. Most of them probably output MPEGs.