sata help

[Mugsy]

ok i jus installed a sata drive and i have a few questions. the drive works fine and everything but it shows up as a removable drive in the system tray even though it shows up as the hard drive in the device manager. Is that normal?
Al the drivers was installed properly too.
And another thing could sum1 give me a simple breakdown of the whole sata-raid concept?

[W1nTry]

Thats fine, in many of the cases i've seen this is normal. No need to worry about it, but word of advice, don't unmount the drive :p i've never tried it, but I doubt it'd be a good thing.

[Mugsy]

lol @ dont unmount the drive. I was actually going to try that a couple minutes ago.
oh and another thing i have 1 drive and it was set to stripping not mirroring does that affect its performance

[Nephilim]

by "sata-raid concept" I'll assume you mean raid 0, right?
well basically is like this, yuh have 2 hdd satas, both of the same type preferably as they need to be ~ the same size, and you have them both hooked up right?

Well normally they would be seen as two independent drives and would act accordingly (in os)
What the raid does is set them up so that they are essentially a larger drive of 2Xhdd size, and would be seen as such in the os, however they are actually 2 as you know b/c u put it in

what raid0 does is increase the speed of the system disk by sharing the information that goes to the "larger" disk by sending a portion (theoretically 1/2 & 1/2) to each disk. so is like this;

if 2 mb write in 2 secs along 1 path
then 1 mb go right in 1 sec,along 1 path right?

how it does this (increase performance/speed) is by sending the portions of the file along 2 paths (the 2 sata cable connecting the drives to the board)

so...

2 mb write in 1 secs along 2 path

it a lil more complex but that what google for

the only downside to this is that both hdd contain data about any given file (again, theoretically 1/2 & 1/2), so if one go, yuh in pootootie!

usually people use very fast hdds which tend to be a little small (like the wd raptors 10krpm - 37 gig) and have them in raid0, and then one extra for storage (or 2 if yuh wha raid1)

that way yuh maximize the effect of the raid0 by not bottle necking it with slow rpm = slow seek times.

couldn't that removable drive ting happen if the drive hot-swappable?

[W1nTry]

Generally, many SATA mobos that support RAID ARE indeed hot swappable. Many ppl I think don't realize this. This functionality is necessary as if you use RAID 1 or mirroring and 1 or more of the drives in the mirror fails, you SHOULD be able to swap back in a WORKING drive and have the mirror rebuild itself. In fact I know someone who can attest to such a feature being built into mobos supporting SATA since socket A days. A friend of mine has had 2 HD failures in his A7V880 mobo and has hot swapped 2 HDs into his RAID1 array both times with no interruption of services... nice huh! that aside, I would avoid RAID0 however as should you suffer either a HD failure OR a mobo failure (i've suffered this before), your data is pretty much useless. If you lose a HD too bad, its gone, if you loose the mobo, you gotta wait for an identical mobo replacement. RAID5 IS the way to go, but its only seen in servers and HIGH END desktops. Not to mention you need a minimum of 3 drives. RAID0+1 could be an option, but i've never really seen anyone use it.

[Nephilim]

Generally, many SATA mobos that support RAID ARE indeed hot swappable. Many ppl I think don't realize this. This functionality is necessary as if you use RAID 1 or mirroring and 1 or more of the drives in the mirror fails, you SHOULD be able to swap back in a WORKING drive and have the mirror rebuild itself. In fact I know someone who can attest to such a feature being built into mobos supporting SATA since socket A days. A friend of mine has had 2 HD failures in his A7V880 mobo and has hot swapped 2 HDs into his RAID1 array both times with no interruption of services... nice huh! that aside, I would avoid RAID0 however as should you suffer either a HD failure OR a mobo failure (i've suffered this before), your data is pretty much useless. If you lose a HD too bad, its gone, if you loose the mobo, you gotta wait for an identical mobo replacement. RAID5 IS the way to go, but its only seen in servers and HIGH END desktops. Not to mention you need a minimum of 3 drives. RAID0+1 could be an option, but i've never really seen anyone use it.

that make sense no downtime for hdd faliure, and most are hot swappable eh, hmmmm something to do next time ah borde

as an add on to the avoiding raid0 thing, i say if yuh need the performance (as in a gaming rig for example) then go for it, but if this isn't a gaming only rig and is a all purpose machine, then avoid it, it make no sense sacrificing integrity for speed, which is why i undid the raid0 thing on my machine (like W1nTry i had a drive fail on me, 'cept with some boss $4!7 in it) so unless yuh need to have 100+ FPS and yuh wha yuh games load in like a sec, just stick with good ole plug-n'-play

raid5 eh?
never really read up on it, will do so now, as i have like 4 drives already