joining hard drives

[alku83]

This isn't strictly fair use related, but i seem to remember someone saying a while ago something about how XP can sort of 'join' hard drives. Like if i have 2 30gb hard drives, using XP i can make this apepar as one 60gb drive.
This would be great for fairuse/fubatch combo, any suggestions?

[fu2k]

I haven't used these myself, but Windows 2000 supports them too. You need to convert your drives to "dynamic disks" to use this feature. Go into disk management and lookup "spanned volumes" in the help.

[alku83]

Thanks fu2k, I've got it now. I must say, it look a little daunting and the advantages don't seem to be as great as I initially thought. Especially the part about how you can only delete something on a spanned volume by deleting the whole volume and starting again. Has anyone had any experience using this, I was just wondering what your thoughts were? I don't think I will do it, now I'm just merely curious.

[buddha2001]

The only way to get the best advantages of 2 hard drives as one volume is to purchase a raid controller card (heh $40 canadian) ... and setup a raid-0 striping setup. I have 2 7200 RPM 80 gig western digital drives running on a raid-0 with a highpoint controller (with a HPT370 chipset).

Runs fast as all hell. The only down-side to this is no parity (in other words, one drive dies, you're f*x0red) ... Just use fans in your case so the drives don't over-heat, and let scandisk complete if you shut-down improperly and you're good :) lol

Buddha2001

[chemmajik]

Buddha will ever hitting reset effect raid 0 drives in anyway, as long as nothing is reading or writing like corrupt them? Just curious about this aspect in whether I want to raid or not, since I do have a ata100 controller in my new machine, but no raid.

[buddha2001]

As long as nothing is reading / writing to the drives ... you can press the reset button ... mind you, during the reboot, if you get a scandisk, let it complete ... also ... if you DON'T get a scandisk ... still do one, and try to keep the drive with minimal errors ...

i love my raid setup ... with avi files, it only takes me 50 seconds to join a 2 hour film (to mux video with audio) ... the cool thing about raid is that it's another bus altogether, so you regain CPU resources (instead of using horrible IDE interfaces). It's like having a low-priced, high-end scsi equivalent in that you are not saturating your CPU or your bus when you raid drives perform operations.

hope that helps u in your decision

Buddha

[MxxCon]

ide is not "horrible". during file copy my cpu uses <1% so raid will not make that much differnt.
in XP/2K you can mount another hd as directly on existing drive. i don't know if this will work if you mount it to /
recommend backing up your data when you do that :)

[buddha2001]

The main advantage to raid in my opinion is to those who use a lot of IDE devices (CD-ROM/DVD drives, burners etc.,) ... the buses are totally seperate (as raid has it's own interface chipset). it's cost effective ... I wouldn't trust software to do the same job hardware would do (the mounting process under 2k/XP)

Just food for thought :)

Buddha2001

[prom3theus]

I think the main benefit for RAID has little to do with cpu usage, but rather with the bus usage. Your hard drive can only accept so much data at once and cpu usage I think really isn't the issue. The RAID controller basically offloads data to two drives simultaneously (logically, physically it takes some small overhead I believe to route the data, insignificant compared to drives speeds I'm sure). I use RAID and I've noticed a huge improvement over my ata-100 drive. I use two slower ata-100 drives in raid now and I get rock stable capturing at raw video at 20MB/second.