Raid 0 question

can i get a ummm....Express card ^^ Thank you jkleiss. I know you can get one that has usb 3.0 or eSATA ports on them. Would I be able to get a eSATA or usb 3.0 one and connect 2 external hardrives to them and do a RAID 0?

 

Expresscard.
USB3.0 NO
eSATA i dont think so

edit: sorry misread the question, thought u wanted to raid ur internal with 1 external
actually it is possible

 

their supposed to just show up as regular drives right? My external on eSATA shows up us a regular drive and it says i can stripe it if i had another drive.....would be cool if i could stripe 2 externals. I would stripe my 2 internal 320gig 7200rpm drives but windows wont let me....not sure why.

 

No that will not work. There are some external cases that allow you to have two hard disks in raid and then connect them using a single connector. But they are mostly for NAS systems and not portable. Some have esata however, not sure about USB 3.0.

 

why wont that work?

 

because esata controllers don't support hardware raid. At least never seen one that does.

Since Windows doesn't let you create Dynamic Disks on external drives you cant do Software raid also.

There would be too many problems. If you connect them on different ports the next time the raid might be broken or not recognized. I am not sure what would happen if you connect one drive before the other. I guess it would tell you its a corrupt disk. Then if the 2nd is connected it would need to rebuild the raid. I dont think there is any software that could manage this. There really is no upside. Only way it could work is if you connect both drives before booting and always use the same ports in the same order. IF any drive gets disconnected for any reason all your data might but junk.

 

Why? Just why?

 

This guy managed it, but restricted by pci express 1.0

 

eSATA can not do hardware raid...huh? I thought eSATA was the exact same tech as SATA except it was external...i never heard there was a difference.

 

Yea read
where it says

"Full SATA speed for external disks (115 MB/s) have been measured with external RAID enclosures"

 

The controller needs to be able to do hardware raid. Not all controllers can. Many SATA controllers do not support hardware raid.

Since most eSATA controllers are additional ships on the main board and only have a single port, they do not support raid.

As JKleiss mentioned above there seem to be some eSATA express cards that do support raid, but judging by the report linked above it is not worth using.

 

External raid enclosures are external cases that combine multiple drives in a raid and then connect with a single esata port to the computer. They are seen by the esata controller as a single disk. The case does the raid and not the controller.

 

ummm thats wrong....my single drive through eSATA can reach 140MBps

http://img541.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=internallol.png
Look at the sisoft sandra test....hd tune pro is inaccurate...program glitches on some drives. Thee sisoft sandra test maxes at 136MBps


EDIT:I updated wikipedia so now its accurate ^^


EDIT: ignore that eSATA is 3Gbps so i still think that 2.5Gbps for that adapter is worth doing a raid 0 for my steam and multimedia ^^ Granted it'll be limited to my laptop but whatever. Also If i discount the drives and through them into a desktop with a raid control will that still work...or if i transfer my express card to another laptop would that also transfer my raid0?

EDIT: So worth it this thing is only 40 bucks http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adexc34-2e.asp