Raid 0 , Raid 1 and Formatting-Recovery

Hi

My R2 seems to be running a bit slower than usual so was toying with formatting or restoring to factory state .
Problem i have is its Raid 1 (mirroring) just now and i fancy making it Raid 0 .
Im a bit noobish here dispite trying to read up on internet about it and from what i understand i cant change it without loosing everything , does this also mean the recovery partition will be deleted as well ?
I cant see the point of mirroring when i have a dedicated external drive for backing up weekly anyway .
Would Raid 0 speed it up slightly ? Seems 50/50 on what i have read as to wether it should or not.
If it means my recovery partition would be deleted i'll just leave it as is .
I have been in the RST control panel and seen options for Raid etc but i really am not sure what im doing

Thanks for any advice

 

Hi, yes if you remove the raid1 you will lose everything, I.e. Backup first.
As for the restore partition it will also go but if you re-create to raid0 array and use the recovery DVD it will restore and put recovery partition back.

 

Raid 1 = Mirrored (2 x 500GB HDD's = 500GB Available)
* Best if you REALLY want to make sure you don't lose your data. If one drive fails, you simply remove it and run on the good drive (non-raid).
Raid 0 = Shared (2 x 500GB HDD's = 1TB Available)
* Data is stored equally on both drives, so if one drive fails you're toast, all your data is gone.
Non-Raid = Seperate (2 x 500GB HDD's = 1TB Available)
* Data is stored on whatever drive you put it on, but if you lose one drive you don't lose all of your data, just what was on that particular drive.

You could just switch to Non-Raid and you wouldn't have to do anything. All your data will be on Drive 1, and you simply reformat drive 2 and BAM double the storage space. Your recovery partition will also be maintained.

Its debatable whether or not there is a performance increase switching to RAID 1.

 

Ah thank you ... i didnt realise that

 

This is all good info .... thanks for this .

 

FYI - be careful. If your system did not ship raid (it sounds like it did ship raid 1 however) and you go raid 0 your restore will not boot. The same may apply when going from raid 1 to raid 0. Not sure, havent tried switching raid versions.

 

The system shipped with Raid 1 ( mirroring ) .
Strangely enough i removed the latest Ati video driver 10.11 or 10.12 not sure which one and went back to the latest Dell video driver because i was having issues with games and the system seems to have sorted its self out and seems faster again .
Maybe not connected but im glad it seems fine again

 

Hi Proz,

I am a RAID 1 guy with ATI and probably the near identical machine as you have. Mine is about 3 weeks old and I have learned a ton about it, as I have done a full wipe, OS and driver rebuild, and at one time even considered switching to RAID 0, as I do most of my work in Dropbox and am very well-backed. I have read (and argued) and several have done similarly with me, and I will give you my personal opinion AND I will give you some hard facts as well:

The choice of RAID 0 or 1 is highly-contentious among gamer types, but the facts are that most applications will not be hugely different in performance (though the 'benchmarkers' will often argue that their idealized tests speak otherwise). Another absolute fact: RAID 1 is statistically much more reliable than RAID 0. For a reasonable lifetime model of a hard drive, a RAID 0 system pair has half the mean-time-between-failures of a single hard drive. RAID 1 is more reliable than a single hard drive and much more reliable than RAID 0, statistically. My personal opinion: don't change your RAID to 0 unless you don't work with lots of valuable data or are REALLY diligent about backup.

Something else: As others here have said, you can change your RAID straightaway, but you WILL need to wipe and redo. I have done the "research" on OS wipes and driver redos for this system and I am shortly going to post a full sequence and instructions based on my experiences with doing it several times with some bad driver sequences. A few others on this forum have done similarly, and you could probably get by with their data too. It isn't that hard, but you should do it "just so" so if you want to go this route, stay tuned (if you can wait a couple days) and I will post the big story. Hint: don't use your "resource disk", whatever you do. Also, go chipset, then video driver, then other stuff, and keep the OSD and infrared fairly late in the sequence. Do command center last, after Windows updates load. More later....

 

Hi and thanks for your input , I'll certainly wait for your Post