Installed RAID 1 - Did I do this right?

Glenn Overholt · 05-28-2006, 11:45 PM

I decided to upgrade and use my Intel 925 board's SATA connections, and install RAID 1. I'm just not sure if it came out right!

I got 2 identical SATA drives and plugged them into (SATA) 0 and 1, and got a 3rd SATA driver (250gig) split it up in halves. (125gig each).
Then I ran the setup. I ended up with my "C" drive is the 1st half of my 250 gig, my "D" drive is the 2nd half of the 250 gig. "E' is my SATA DVD/ROM, and "F" is my XP operating system files.

Did I do this right?

Glenn

Kimmo Jaskari · 05-29-2006, 08:31 AM

Doesn't sound quite right to me. What did you intend do do with the RAID1?

Reading that, F might be the RAID1, but hard to tell depending on your explanation only.

Did you install RAID drivers in your operating system as well? During an initial install of a RAID setup, you almost always need to tap F6 and feed the machine a floppy disk with the drivers on it to make it "see" the RAID1 "disk" comprising the two actual drives.

The usual flow of work would be to install the drives physically, start the machine, wait for the RAID BIOS on your motherboard to flash a message at you to press button combination X to enter the RAID settings and then set up the RAID array. After the array is set up, you boot the PC from the operating system install CD/DVD and (with Windows) tap F6 to enter third party drivers before continuing with formatting the RAID "drive" you created in the RAID BIOS and installing the operating system on that.

Glenn Overholt · 05-29-2006, 01:21 PM

Sorry. F is what I set up to be the RAID drives for my OS. It was just that their SATA numbers were 0 & 1, and I sort of expected those to be the Raid "C" drive. Does RAID bump their drives to the end of the drive letter chain?

Your last paragraph was exactly what I did. It is just that I haven't read anywhere that the drive letters for RAID get bumped, although since I did have 2 physical drives and ended up with one RAID, That would be one way to solve the problem of the (missing) drive letter.

Glenn

Kimmo Jaskari · 05-29-2006, 03:13 PM

Windows can be funny about assigning drive letters under some circumstances. Perhaps you should have had only the raid drives in the machine (and the optical drives of course) during install and then tacked the other drives on after the OS was installed.

Having Windows on F doesn't really affect things much otherwise, as far as I know.

Dennis*G · 05-29-2006, 10:53 PM

Kimmo is going in the right direction. Should have just had the 2 drives in the system and set up RAID and install the os. Once that is installed and working correctly, then add in the other SATA drive.

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Glenn Overholt · 05-29-2006, 11:15 PM

Very interesting, to say the least. I use Explorer a lot because I started out on PC's with DOS 2.1. Now I have the drives that I use on top, and the OS last! Too Cool!

Ok, thanks!

Glenn

Chris · 05-30-2006, 02:08 AM

Yep, installing and building a RAID-1 after you have an OS installed can be a bit tricky.

In the end, this does not seem right at all. In a RAID-1 configuration, drive C: would be on BOTH drives at the exact same time as a stripe. Think of it like this:

Drive 1 Drive 2

C: Partition C: Parition
D: Partition D: Partition

Drive 2 simply maintains a complete clone of Drive1 at all times that is updated in real time with the reads and write calls off of the disc controller. So, in a RAID1 configuration, Write speeds are slow (because it's writing the same data to two drives at the same time) but read speeds are fast (the same data exists on both drives and can be read that way).

If properly setup, Windows should not see anything BUT the same drives on the main drive of the RAID.

The best way to check is this:

Right Click My Computer
Choose Manage
Go to Device Manager
Look under DISC drives

You should see something labeled "RAID Storage Array" or something like that. If you see a lot of seperate Disc drives that you think are in an array, that's wrong. Windows if properly loaded with the driver will only see a single continuous volume because the entire point of the RAID driver for windows is to allow it to present as one volume so the driver and hardware can handle all writes and reads at the base hardware level. If that's not showing up in some way (NVRAID Storage, Intel RAID Storage, RAID array, etc.) then something is wrong.

But the way you describe it, I don't think Windows is seeing it correctly at all.

Glenn Overholt · 05-30-2006, 12:47 PM

I think it is ok, I just put it in backwards.
My devices show R1 and the name of my 2nd drive.
I put my own files on my non-raid drive first. I did that by plugging in the SATA #0 cable into it and copying files over from my old disk drives, while I was still running my old OS.
Then I moved that drive to SATA #3, and put the 2 identical drives into SATA #0 & #1, put the XP disk in the disk drive, and started it up.
XP certainly loads up faster now, but I'm sure that I have a few more programs to put in, so we shall see.
The only 'weird' thing is that the computer's start-up files just had to be on my "C" drive. I thought that MS had more brains than that! Oops, my bad!

Like I said though, with my OS listed last in Explorer, I don't have to collapse directories just to get to the drives that I want to see.

Maybe someday...

Glenn

Kimmo Jaskari · 05-30-2006, 01:13 PM

Since the install was done properly with the RAID array created and drivers added, there seems to be little doubt that F is indeed a mirrored drive.

Mirroring will also speed up reading. Reads are usually done in a round-robin way so it will read from both drives, that will speed up boot a bit. If it were a RAID0, a stripe, then it would read in different data from two drives in parallell which would be even faster, but of course even less secure than having a single drive.



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