Best budget raid setup!, check it out!, also please argue against me if you can

[bugmage]

4 deskstarts from newegg, 80gb each 3gb/s transfer cost $200 (45 each, 3 year warranty)
total storage 320 gigs! 32 cache and 12gb/s total transfer speed

alright alright
so may would slap thes in a raid 0 or raid 5, depending on the size of your package, however heres my solution, ive seen that going from 2-4 drives doesnt give you much of a performance boost ad going from 1 drive to raid does, so how about this

-2 raid arrays, of 2 of these drives raid O
-both array has a drive in a seperat controller(if you buy cheap matx nforce board with 2 controlllers 4 stat ports)(mines the 410/430 foxconn)

-one has small strip and clusters and holds the os, the other has large strip and clusters and holds
games and larger files

-both drives have a ntbackup file, one pulls the os off the other smaller array for backup, and the other might pull saved games off the larger file size array, thus if a drive fails you wont loose your stuff

-also the backups will go fast as your backing up from one raid arraid to another raid array

-now if you play a game you dont lose performance as the os is using seperate drives, and vise versa
and you can set up page on both drives

-your data is secure, also depends on how often you set the auto backup

-you could alway buy a bigger drive or run a ide and backup one of the array(probably the big one) to another drive to make sure you have true backups

-now if you still think the performance gain of all on raid 4 with a non optimized cluster and strip will be better than this config please let me know before i set this up this weekend

[agentkay]

Sounds very good to me. :) Now if I just knew how to set something like this up, I´d go for it myself.

[bugmage]

-if you get a motherboard with sata they usally have something in the bios or durring boot that lets you set up the array, you just move the drive from one window to the array window select raid type and strip, 2 times for each array of disks

and then install windows hit f6 to load the raid drivers off floppy, and your set, install the nforce drivers from nvidia when your in windows

as far as nt backup just start>run>ntbackup it opens in a wizard, do select what to backup(savegames) or entire c drive depends on withc backup your doing and then select incramental as type and, add to existing backups, and then hit advanced i think and choose the times, daily backup, weeklyand so forth

and your set

i did it with nvidia nforce 4 other chipsets might be sucky but nvidia was a breeze:)

[agentkay]

Thanks for the info bugmage! Doesn´t sound too complicated after all. :D

[john19055]

I found that a 4 drive in raid-0 was not what I excepted ,it seem like 3 drives in Raid-0 was the fastest setup according to benchmarks,but in real would test loading games I could'nt tell that is was any faster then a 2 drive in Raid-0,so I just kept it at 2 raid setups with 2 drives in Raid-0 stipped at default.

[Buenamos]

I personally would recommend this setup instead:
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202365827&adid=17662
$83 a piece, $166 total for 500gb of space. PLUS
new customers get $10 off.
http://www.buy.com/retail/coupon.asp?prid=85634947&adid=17662

Free shipping also ;)

Yes, I've noticed these aren't quite as fast, but I doubt there's much of a load time difference...not to mention u get 180gb more space to play with. :)

[bugmage]

its nice to see this post finally come alive, i have 4 hataches ill be setting up sometie tomrrow, im still wavering in my past decitions as with 2 i had a xfer of 120mb/s, and ive seen people run them in sets of 4 raid 0 and get 170mb/s

http://www.digitalelements.org/index.php?name=MReviews&op=show&rid=21

-hmmm mayb i will go with the 4 drive setup
-100mb/s vs 170 mb/s for average read, and i have another drive ill autobackup on lol
- what cluster strip size should i use?

also not a bad drive deal, but agian i already have space up the whazu for my needs