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Raid 0 - how does it utilise the disks?


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#1
dfoss

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I have a MS6380 board - that's a K7T266 Pro2 with on-board Promise 20265R and a couple of 80Gb maxtors (reported as the C: drive and the E: drive). I have it set up as Raid 0 What puzzles me is that it appears that little or no use is being made of the E: drive - Windows explorer reports currently 76.3Gb 21Gb free on the C: drive and 76.3Gb 76.2Gb free on the E: drive. I thought that Raid 0 shared the data between the two disks to speed up the read and write. Can anyone enlighten me as to what is happening here? and how it works? or do I have a problem? PCWizard 2006 happily reports both as 2+0 Stripe/Raid0 28% free on C: 100% free on E: - so it all looks to be OK - am I missing something? I expected to see an even split between the drives.
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#2
Neil Jones

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RAID 0 strips the data across two disks.
If you're seeing two separate drives of 80Gb each then they're not in RAID 0 configuration - they're both standalone. If they were in RAID, you'd see one 160Gb drive C.
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#3
dfoss

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That's what I would have expected - but as I say Windows "My Computer" reports the drives separately.

But under "Disk drives - properties - hardware " -it reports "Promise 2+0 stripe/Raid 0 scsi Disk Device" and under Volumes it reports "Disk 1, Type Basic, Status: Online, Partition Style: Master Boot Record(MBR), Capacity 156320Mb, Unallocated space 0Mb, Reserve Space: 0Mb Volumes: Raid(C:) 78152Mb, Raid (E:) 78168Mb. The word Raid in the disk titles is of course the name I put on the two Maxtors on the raid sockets - so that is not too significant.

Similarly if I go into the Raid Bios the Array appears as "Array 1. Raid Mode -Stripe, Total Drives - 2, Capacity-160Mb, Status - functional.

All that would suggest that it's correctly configured for Raid0 - but Windows explorer is not calling it one drive - What am I missing here??? :whistling:

Edit: - I have just copied some big video files to deliberately try to overflow from the C: to the E: by exceeding the size of C: - but windows wouldn't play - said "not enough space" so it does not look like my Raid 0 is working. :blink:

another Edit: - Could this be to do with Basic versus dynamic disks?? - see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343 - If that is the case - ie I need to convert to dynamic - can I do this without losing my current load of programs??

Edited by dfoss, 10 May 2007 - 09:33 AM.

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#4
Neil Jones

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What might have happened is that the RAID 0 drive (which is 160Gb) has been partitioned into two, both of 80Gb. In this case Windows will effectively see them as two separate drives.

If you go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and select your hard drive, it'll tell you here how many partitions there are on the drive. Post a screengrab of it and we'll see what it actually says.
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#5
dfoss

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Spot on - That's what I have done - I must have created two partitions when I set it up. So it fooled me into thinking I was looking at the two drives, where in fact I am Striping the drive correctly in raid 0. Not only that - as I like to keep a partition just for Video editing so that I can quickly defrag it which makes Pinnacle run much more sweetly with less crashes I have the best setup for me - the benefit of Raid 0 and a clean partition to work in.

For those as slow to cotton on as I am - when I looked at this Computer Management - disk Management page - Attached File  raid.doc   55.5KB   31 downloads I failed to see the significance of the Layout column saying "partition" - and the green border to the schematic which indicates "extended partition" as well as the blue bar which indicates "Logical drive"

All is now clear - thanks to Neil and also to a pal who also sussed it out from a screenshot of this attachment

Edited by dfoss, 10 May 2007 - 04:34 PM.

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