Raid set up questions

I am purchasing 2 WD7502AAEX HDDs for a raid 0 set up as my boot drives.

Specs on HDDs are:
750Gb, 64Mb cache, 7200RPM, Sata6Gb/S, WD Caviar Black

Is there a way I can clone/copy/or whatever you wanna call it my current 750Gb HDD image on to the Raid set up? If so what program to use and how would I go about doing it. Would I have to reinstall windows and all the drivers and my games and what not doing this?

you should be able to clone your current 750GB to the new raid 0 drive set with a clone tool (ghost, clonezilla, etc)
I use clonezilla when I need to image a HDD, easy to setup and boot either via USB or CD
http://clonezilla.org/

if your raid is gonna be setup via hardware then you shouldn't have a problem imaging from drive to drive with it. It should just see the two diff drives.

also, if you got 4 drives you could do a Raid 0+1 or 1+0 for even more performance & fault tolerance.

I thought it could be done but I've never messed with that type of stuff before. I could get 4 of those HDDs but then Id run outta room in my tower...... Although a 3Tb raid set up would be more than Id need....... Or I could do the 4x HDD raid set up and move my pump to be able to use the expansion bays for my other HDDs......... Too much to think about right now!

What's the hype about RAID anyway? Pros/Cons? I kiiiinda know what it does but not exactly.

It depends on which config you use but the main one people use is raid zero which means that it makes 2 physical drives act as 1 while seperating info like on disc 1 it stores 1,3,5,7,9 info and on disc 2 it stores 2,4,6,8,10 and cause it to load faster because each drive only has to read and write a certain portion. so what would take 30 seconds to load a game will take half the time usually and also makes installing, copying, downloading and deleting software faster aswell.

hmm...I may have to look into that...interesting.

if each HDD has a max transfer rate of X MB/s and you stripe 4 bits accross 4 HDD's (Raid 1) you basically can achieve 4x the read and write speeds... now if you mirror one drive to another (raid 0) you can achieve double read speeds, plus if one drive fails, you're all good, its like having a live backup... so put those together raid 0+1 and you get a mix of performance and fault tolerance....

as the raid level goes up, more complex things happen and thus incur overhead performance hits.. but can achieve better reliability and fault tolerance... example, raid 3 does a striping with a dedicated drive for parity bits (if you have 4 bits, a parity bit would be a bit 1/0 that tells you if those 4 bits have an even or odd number sum... so 0001 would give you a parity of 0 and 0011 would give parity of 1 since there are 2 bits that are 1, way oversimplification for explanation purposes) soooo if you lose bit #3 you would be able to recover it because you know how many bits were in the set and whether it was an even or odd number and thus can determine what that bit was by looking at the other bits...

raid is awesome.

thrilla you trying to scare him away from raids now arent you?

if each HDD has a max transfer rate of X MB/s and you stripe 4 bits accross 4 HDD's (Raid 1) you basically can achieve 4x the read and write speeds... now if you mirror one drive to another (raid 0) you can achieve double read speeds, plus if one drive fails, you're all good, its like having a live backup... so put those together raid 0+1 and you get a mix of performance and fault tolerance....

as the raid level goes up, more complex things happen and thus incur overhead performance hits.. but can achieve better reliability and fault tolerance... example, raid 3 does a striping with a dedicated drive for parity bits (if you have 4 bits, a parity bit would be a bit 1/0 that tells you if those 4 bits have an even or odd number sum... so 0001 would give you a parity of 0 and 0011 would give parity of 1 since there are 2 bits that are 1, way oversimplification for explanation purposes) soooo if you lose bit #3 you would be able to recover it because you know how many bits were in the set and whether it was an even or odd number and thus can determine what that bit was by looking at the other bits...

raid is awesome.

._.

Is there a way I can clone/copy/or whatever you wanna call it my current 750Gb HDD image on to the Raid set up?

There are many ways to do this, you could use clonezilla like thrilla recommended, but I like acronis (but u have to [s]download[/s] pay for it)

This is how I would do it:
Install new HDDs in Case
Boot up to Bios and set up raid
Install acronis on existing Windows
Configure acronis to clone HDD to new RAID System
(This will reboot your computer, and boot up into acronis. Acronis will now transfer your files over. This will also change the partition from 750GB to 1.5TB)
Once done, you can, either change the boot order to the new RAID 0 System or remove the old HDD.

I forgot to mention, RAID 0 is terrible for redundancy. If the power goes out, and one drive fails, you're screwed. Maybe get 1 more drive and set it up in RAID 5. So you get the speed of 3 HDDs, and you get redundancy in case one fails.

I forgot to mention, RAID 0 is terrible for redundancy. If the power goes out, and one drive fails, you're screwed. Maybe get 1 more drive and set it up in RAID 5. So you get the speed of 3 HDDs, and you get redundancy in case one fails.

yes raid 0 is striping only, so if yo lose a drive you lose the whole thing, but its the absolute fastest performance boost... (but you have a backup anyways rite!? hehe )
raid 1 is mirroring so if you lose one drive you still have the other one... raid 0+1 combines the two and you "mirror" a "stripped" set, getting all the performance gains with the least amount of overhead. one drawback is that you only get double the space instead of quadruple 4x750GB drives will give you one 1.5TB drive not 3TB for example...

Raid 5 does give you great fault tolerance and you get more of the space out of the drives... BUT there is a decent amount of overhead associated with raid 5 so you may see increased cpu usage compared to raid 0+1. but the performance of raid 5 can be blistering due to the way it stripes data too.

four drives in raid 0 or better yet four ssd's in raid 0 can land you some crazy i/o speeds

I forgot to mention, RAID 0 is terrible for redundancy. If the power goes out, and one drive fails, you're screwed. Maybe get 1 more drive and set it up in RAID 5. So you get the speed of 3 HDDs, and you get redundancy in case one fails.

yes raid 0 is striping only, so if yo lose a drive you lose the whole thing, but its the absolute fastest performance boost... (but you have a backup anyways rite!? hehe )
raid 1 is mirroring so if you lose one drive you still have the other one... raid 0+1 combines the two and you "mirror" a "stripped" set, getting all the performance gains with the least amount of overhead. one drawback is that you only get double the space instead of quadruple 4x750GB drives will give you one 1.5TB drive not 3TB for example...

Raid 5 does give you great fault tolerance and you get more of the space out of the drives... BUT there is a decent amount of overhead associated with raid 5 so you may see increased cpu usage compared to raid 0+1. but the performance of raid 5 can be blistering due to the way it stripes data too.

four drives in raid 0 or better yet four ssd's in raid 0 can land you some crazy i/o speeds

RAID 0 is the best way to go if you keep a lot of back ups, especially if you have 4 drives in RAID 0. In a game, you're playing off of RAM. And since the HDD is not being touched (unless, for example, a sounds plays, or the map loads, it will load that into RAM, then play it), plus if you have an i7 Sandybridge, RAID 5 wont even use a mere 1 % even when writing/reading to the HDD and All RAIDs will use up CPU performance, but not a lot (unless u have a dedicated controller). But anyways, RAID 5 or RAID 10 (1+0) will be far better then RAID 0. Also remember, he is concerned about HDD Space in the tower. Plus RAID 5 means buying one less drive. It really depends on which solution. There are so many pros and cons.
This is a simplified list, Im not going to go into details:

RAID 0:
Pro: Extremely fast speed, uses 2-4 HDD slots
Con: Significantly higher chance of drive failure and must buy more HDDs for back up space
RAID 5:
Pro: Fast and Redundant, uses 3 HDD slots, cheaper then RAID 10, more space then RAID 10
Con: Lots of I/Os, a slightly bit more of CPU
RAID 10:
Pro: 2 Drive Redundancy but slightly faster then RAID 5, less I/Os
Con: 4 HDD slots, least amount of space, and would cost the most

Thanks for the replys guys, this is helping me out. I really shouldnt be worried about HDD space as I am going to be switching up my water pump from the MASSIVE Innovatek Eheim HPPS i High Power 12V Water Pump to a MCP350 DDC-1 water pump. Its about 1/4 the size with more performance! Then I will have the expansion bays open for business.

http://www.swiftech.com/mcp350.aspx not buying from here but these are the specs it has. Know a guy that sells them for $35 shipped!




What would you recommend? I can get 3 of the HDDs without question but adding a fourth will push my budget further than I should. I can then take this other 750gb out and wipe it clean and store it for later use. I'll keep the 1.5TB I have in there now for storage like it is being used as. I could use that as a Fraps drive also...... hmmm.

Also not too worried about CPU usage. I have the i7 2600k! I have yet to push it to the limits. I amaze myself with its power daily.

Thanks for the replys guys, this is helping me out. I really shouldnt be worried about HDD space as I am going to be switching up my water pump from the MASSIVE Innovatek Eheim HPPS i High Power 12V Water Pump to a MCP350 DDC-1 water pump. Its about 1/4 the size with more performance! Then I will have the expansion bays open for business.

http://www.swiftech.com/mcp350.aspx not buying from here but these are the specs it has. Know a guy that sells them for $35 shipped!

What would you recommend? I can get 3 of the HDDs without question but adding a fourth will push my budget further than I should. I can then take this other 750gb out and wipe it clean and store it for later use. I'll keep the 1.5TB I have in there now for storage like it is being used as. I could use that as a Fraps drive also...... hmmm.

Also not too worried about CPU usage. I have the i7 2600k! I have yet to push it to the limits. I amaze myself with its power daily.

I have nothing Against RAID 10, but its more pricey, less storage. With 4 HDDs, you'll get 1.5TB. All it offers is less I/Os and 2 drive redundancy. Having 2 drives fail within a small period of time is very rare.

3x500GB HDDs = about 1.2TB in RAID 5. So... Im making a guess that 3x 750 GB will equal almost 2 TB. With a Core i7 sandybridge overclocked, you wont notice the difference. Im all for RAID 5.