Raid Question

[Cain]

Can I have a SSD as my primary drive, then two raid hard drives in RAID 1 (Mirroring) as my secondary drives??

I want the two mirrored drives to appear as a single secondary drive to my OS.

How exactly do I do this?

[Dead...Again]

Yes. The best way would probably to buy a PCIe RAID card for your RAID array. That way you can leave the SSD in AHCI mode. Do not use IDE mode for the SSD.

[Cain]

Aha... So get a RAID Card for my mirrored data drives??? That is the best way to go?

[Dead...Again]

I would think so. I think you can get them pretty cheap and they are easy to set up. WT might be able to help more.

[Cain]

Looks like about 300 bucks for a good card. I can swing that.

[juneau]

Looks like about 300 bucks for a good card. I can swing that.

Depending on your board, buying a separate raid controller card isn't necessary.

Some of the comments here will sum it up much more quickly than I could by typing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/...hdd-raid0.html

[Cain]

Apparently not many of you are using RAId.

[Rand{CLR}]

Depending on your board, buying a separate raid controller card isn't necessary.

Some of the comments here will sum it up much more quickly than I could by typing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/...hdd-raid0.html

This.

I have the setup you describe. It was built for me (Cyberpower), but I'm using an SSD as the prime drive and a RAID 1 as the D: drive. I do not have a RAID card--it's done on my Mobo, and it relies on a couple of jumpers on the drives and configuration through the BIOS and HDD setup programs.

-Rand

[Duke{CLR}]

I had a RAID 5 going that was run off my MB until I had a power failure take the whole thing out. I haven't bothered since.

[goldenfooler]

I hardly have anything I want to save on my computer. For some reason I have a 1tb memory and only using like 70 gb

[K PhaNTOM]

A lot of people don't use RAID because it has been a pain in the ass for me to set up. SSDs seem to hate RAID. The only thing that didn't cause me issues were velociraptors. This whole BIOS set up of ACHI (sp?) or RAID or a third option. Every time you run them it resets, you get errors. Most motherboard raid controllers are garbage to begin with. So I gave up on RAID. I did manage to set up my SSDs on RAID one time and got transfer rates of 700MB/s then it all went to hell when I restarted my computer. I wasn't in the mood to fix it either.

[Cain]

Thx Kp. The more I read the more I realize it you want to do RAID right, you need a dedicated RAID controller card. You just confirmed that.

[juneau]

Thx Kp. The more I read the more I realize it you want to do RAID right, you need a dedicated RAID controller card. You just confirmed that.

A dedicated card won't be any less prone to array failure. And that is the reason why most people don't use RAID.

Want speed? Buy an SSD not RAID. Want redundacy? Buy a USB 3.0 drive and do nightly backups and/or get cloud storage.

[WalkinTarget]

Intel 'Larsen Creek' 311 mSATA 20gb SSD configured as a cache drive feeding two Western Digital 1tb Black HDDs (7200 rpm, 32mb cache) in RAID 0 mode. These drives are the primary OS drive and show up as one large 1.8tb volume. I have it further partitioned to separate the data.

C drive - Windows
D drive - Games
E drive - Songs, Movies
F drive - Downloads



I think the last time I benched the drives they were getting 175mb/sec. transfer speed. I forget what the peak was, but the SSDs speed will not translate to these synthetic benchmarks properly. It does its job via Intel's Rapid Storage Technology which works to speed up any recently run apps that are then stored on the SSD.
I'm all up in that RAID hiz-ouse !! I am also in the minority as well, as I rarely see anyone dabbling in RAID these days.

[Cain]

I want Raid 1 for my data drives.

I'll use my SSD as my main drive and it will be completely backed up on a separate WHS box.