RAID 0

[abeesley]

I've recently decided to use this function on my motherboard and installed two 7200rpm 40gb ATA100 drives in parallel.. .. .Wow what a difference, it really flies!. .. .The question I have is, can you defrag a RAID 0 drive? Norton gets a bit confused and gives up. All the other utilities work fine.

[ORAC]

Just remember that if you have a problem with just one of the drives you now lose everything!!

[What_does_this_button_do?]

Consider RAID1.........

[Squiddley]

"Consider Raid 1".. sqge words, AMEN!. .. .Do you really need an 80G C: drive ?! As Orac said, you'll lose the lot if one of the drives gives up. If you need a large HD, then using Raid 1 would at least give you recovery options. Also, should you want to change the config further down the road, you'll lose everything.. .. .Out of interest, is the speed difference *really* that noticeable? I find hardly any improvement with 2x15G drives striped, compared to a plain old secondary ATA100 HD but it's "too late" to change now <img border="0" title="" alt="[Big Grin]" src="biggrin.gif" /> . .. .Defrag-wise, Norton seems to do its thing OK, but takes longer over it. No idea of percentages. If any progs are writing/reading to/from the HD, it will further slow things down.. .. .RGDS

[Narada]

If your motherboard is sopporting the RAID0 (hardware raid), just defrag normally like it is a single drive.. .. .<a href="http://groups.google.com/" target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/</a>. .. .search for: raid0 defrag. .. .Consider RAID1 <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="smile.gif" /> or consider adding a 3rd hard drive (no RAID) to back up the important files.

[tom775257]

Hard drives are very reliable in general, the most likely thing to go wrong with RAID-0 arrays is getting 'broken stripes.' These can be recovered - if you are using a highpoint controller, then get this utility, it might come in handy if you are running FAT32.. .<a href="http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kg7kr7/downloads/utils/raidrb.zip" target="_blank">http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kg7kr7/downloads/utils/raidrb.zip</a>. .Taken from viahardware.com, comes with these instuctions:. .Copy the utility onto a DOS floppy disk, boot from floppy into DOS and then run the utility by typing "raidrb" at the A: prompt (without quotes). You will be presented with four options. . .For the first attempt at rebuilding the RAID array, select option 1 "Create the bak file.And then rebuild!". This will save the configuration of your RAID array and then attempt to rebuild the array. . .For any subsequent attempts at rebuilding the RAID array, select option 2 "Don't create the bak file.And rebuild!". This will rebuild the array using a previously saved bak file. . .If the rebuild fails, use option 3 "Resume these disks' information!" to restore the original disk configuration. This uses the bak file created when you ran option 1. . .After running the utility, reboot, and see if you can access the disk from DOS (eg. type DIR). If you can, your disk is repaired! . .. .you never know, might help you out some day. Obviously better to have a backup though.. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />