Striping with one hdd

I have heard that it is possible to stripe a hdd with Windows XP by creating volumes. This intrigues me, as I would love a performance boost right now. Please, tell me if this is possible, and if so, how to do it. I would like any other feedback on this as well, eg. is it safe, what are the drawbacks, etc.

 

No, its not safe, and the performance increase would be extremly marginal, if at all.

The drawbacks are you have to convert to dynmaic disks. Just like a RAID 0 array, if one disk is formatted or goes down, you lose it all. This is worse, its all software based. Pretty sure it still requires two hard disks.

It only works on XP Pro as well.

 

Not that i know RAID0 (striping) Gets its speed gains by having the odd numbers bytes on one disk, and the even numbers on a second disk. This means instead of having your single disk taking say 5 secs to load a 10Mb file, you can have 2 disks loading 5mb each in 2.5 secs. Theoritically getting a 50% increase, although you never really see that much of an increase. (This is a basic example of how it works, not 100% accurate)

The important bit is having 2 HDD to take half the load each.

So no, striping a solitary disk is not possible that i can remember, and you will get no performance gain from it.

If you do do it, go for the raid option, and buy cheap hardware card.

 

True, but if you have a solitary disk that dies you lose all your data too.

Promise and Via do good Raid0 Cards that are dirt cheap and do it all in hardware, certainly a great way for a speed increase in disk intensive apps. But a normal user doesn't *really* need it i would say, more for SQL/Database servers imo.

 

I need it, lol. I am very picky and every little delay annoys me to no end. This brings up another question, too. Exactly how does RAID-0 work, and do you still have 2 hdds worth of hdd space?

 

Yea the speed increase from RAID is from the multiple disks... a lot of home hard disk technology is kinda the weak link for speed... a single disk spinning at < 10,000 RPMs is never going to be anywhere near as fast as memory... which is why adding more memory provides such a boost - less page swapping for large apps etc.

A RAID 0 config would provide slightly less than n times the data throughput where n is the number of disks - this is of course assuming you ahve a speedy connection to the RAID device... Teh saying that things are only as fast as their weakest component is always true.

RAID 0 doesnt offer any protection against disk failures because it is striped without parity.

a logical RAID off the same physical disk which is partitioned would (in my oppinion) surely be slightly slower than having a single partition if you are striping because your OS has to do logical splitting of the I/Os to the different partitions... it didnt have to worry about that before. It is an overhead.

What I am trying to say is a single disk partitioned in a RAID 0 type array would not offer any increases in performance that I can see. Im not sure why you would want to do it at all... But I may be wrong

Cheers,
Greg

 

No you will have one HDD worth of space.

Doing it with one HDD would likely slow you down, and cut your HDD space in half, not worth doing, it has no advantages i can see.

 

The only increase in speed (running Raid0) I notice is when loading big game maps from like BF1942, Doom3, FarCray... etc.

 

I agree. Figure you have a partitioned hdd for each stripe array.. but ony one read-head on the drive. The read head will have to work harder to read data from each array. You're better off with 2 identical drives in a RAID 0 array; but you're speed is limited to the capactiy of the bus.

 

Thats what I was trying to say...

I sometimes like to go round the houses thats all

Cheers,
Greg

 

Now I have one final question:
Is it a good idea to get a RAID-0 instead of 2 hdds? My friend just ordered a new computer and he got 2 200GB SATA hdds setup in a RAID-0 config. Is that better than getting 2 200GB SATA hdds with no RAID?

 

Thats your choice. RAID is faster, but only 200Gb space. Non Raid is slower but has 400Gb space.

I have a 74Gb 10,000 RPM SATA drive and its more than fast enough for any App, or game i have. Easily.

I'd go for RAID if given the option, unless you need that 200Gb space you will lose for something

 

If you put two non raided drives in, then you have 2 drives logically displayed as 2 drives for a total of 400G. Data is not striped on either drive and so the one read head drawback exists. With a RAID array you have two drives shown as one logical drive for a total of 400G with 2 reads acting as one and double the hdd buffer as well. In the stricted sense , RAID0 is better than one disk. But you are still limited by the bus.

 

You have 2 HDs, and thus your total capacity is the sum of both of the drives independant capacity. Regardless whether you are striping or not, you have the same capacity, except the data is organised differently.

An analogy. Two packs of cards one red and one blue: thats 52 x 2 cards (104).

If you put them one on top of each other, you have 104 cards.

If you alternate the red and blue decks and put them in a pile, you still have 104 cards, but the colours alternate.

So, you can either have two 52 card drives, or one 104 card drives, either way, you still have 104 cards.