[TheWhiteRose000]

Alright,.

I've been studying A+
but something keeps nagging at me.
I got my lovely computer up and running.
But what I want to know is.

I got 2 Onboard SATA III's, if I bought a Raid Card with two SATA III's on it.
Could I Raid them together sense they are both SATA III's?


I don't want to go off and purchase a raid card if I cannot use it.
For reference my motherboard is a.

GA-EP45T-USB3P.

Thanks everyone.

-Daniel-

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http://en.wikipedia....ard_RAID_levels

depending on the raid level, type and size of drive is either relevant or not (how's that for a cryptic answer). while pretty much every level of raid can use dissimilar disks, the size of the resulting array is generally controlled by the size of the smallest drive in the array.

[dsenette]

http://en.wikipedia....ard_RAID_levels

depending on the raid level, type and size of drive is either relevant or not (how's that for a cryptic answer). while pretty much every level of raid can use dissimilar disks, the size of the resulting array is generally controlled by the size of the smallest drive in the array.

[Neil Jones]

A couple of more pertinent questions:

Why do you feel you need a RAID setup in a home environment?
Why the dependence on SATA III? Most hard drives cannot achieve the SATA I specification.

[TheWhiteRose000]

http://en.wikipedia....ard_RAID_levels

depending on the raid level, type and size of drive is either relevant or not (how's that for a cryptic answer). while pretty much every level of raid can use dissimilar disks, the size of the resulting array is generally controlled by the size of the smallest drive in the array.

I understood none of that X-x
I'm trying for a Raid 0 between my SSD's.

A couple of more pertinent questions:

Why do you feel you need a RAID setup in a home environment?
Why the dependence on SATA III? Most hard drives cannot achieve the SATA I specification.

I like speed and power.
And well, having 6 Kingston SSD's being capped by the SATA II ports isn't getting me far.
Speed and power is what my desktop is built around.

Edited by TheWhiteRose000, 31 August 2010 - 01:44 PM.

[dsenette]

RAID 0 performanceWhile the block size can technically be as small as a byte, it is almost always a multiple of the hard disk sector size of 512 bytes. This lets each drive seek independently when randomly reading or writing data on the disk. How much the drives act independently depends on the access pattern from the file system level. For reads and writes that are larger than the stripe size, such as copying files or video playback, the disks will be seeking to the same position on each disk, so the seek time of the array will be the same as that of a single drive. For reads and writes that are smaller than the stripe size, such as database access, the drives will be able to seek independently. If the sectors accessed are spread evenly between the two drives, the apparent seek time of the array will be half that of a single drive (assuming the disks in the array have identical access time characteristics). The transfer speed of the array will be the transfer speed of all the disks added together, limited only by the speed of the RAID controller. Note that these performance scenarios are in the best case with optimal access patterns.

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS server where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2] Another article examined these claims and concludes: "Striping does not always increase performance (in certain situations it will actually be slower than a non-RAID setup), but in most situations it will yield a significant improvement in performance." [3]

technically you don't need to have a RAID controller for "basic" RAID0 by making all of the disks in question dynamic disks and creating a striped volume across the entire array. of course, this is software controlled so you won't get the same "performance" increase as with a hardware controller. so you'd need a simple sata III card to add the 2 extra drives in.

if you're actually wanting to do hardware RAID then it would be suggested to have ALL of the drives on at least one RAID controller (if you can find one with 6 sata III ports, if not you surely can find a RAID controller with 3 and just buy 2 of them) otherwise you're not going to really be able to add the onboard drives into the array (i could be wrong here, i've never tried this, but based on what i do know i don't think you'd be able to have all 6 in the array if some are onboard and some are on a controller) and even if you could, i doubt you'd get the full performance out of the system

[TheWhiteRose000]

I keep seeing the SSD awesomeness video and reading what they wrote near the end and it bugs me that they were able to do it and get a full 2048mb's of speed out of it.
But trying to figure out how they did it is blowing my mind.

[dsenette]

http://www.snotr.com/video/2615 this one?

[dsenette]

unfortunately in that video they didn't exactly list all of their hardware and i have yet to find any specs on the googles....based on what little hardware they do list (mainly those fancy cables) i think they're using a SAS based RAID controller (as those fancy cables that they do list that go to the drives are SAS to 4x sata cables)

[TheWhiteRose000]

Well by looking up the Areca cards they used, you can see that they were using a Raid card for a server in a PCI16x slots sense they are compatible with it.
They were all SATA II's though, and one card had 16 slots, and the other 8 slots, but the 16 slot one reached its cap so he put some onboard to use.

:3

I watched the video way too much to get idea's.