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    setting up a raid disk

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by jisaac, Mar 20, 2008.

  1. jisaac

    jisaac Notebook Deity

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    hi,
    this may sound like a noob question but i am not very experienced in creating raid disks. I was wondering whether it would be possible to set up a raid 0 with the internal drive in my laptop combined with a flash card(compact flash etc..) inserted in the side of my laptop as the other drive. If this is at all possible it think i would need to use a software raid program, what would you recommend?
    thanks
     
    jisaac, Mar 20, 2008
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  2. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    I am only familiar with desktop HD RAID systems set up with a dedicated RAID card. However, you are aware that most flash cards have transfer speeds of around 3MBps due to the interface, unless you hook a Solid State Drive with an eSata interface. As a result, even if such a RAID setup was possible, it would be pretty much pointless.
     
    Budding, Mar 20, 2008
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  3. gerryf19

    gerryf19 I am the walrus

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    No. Not possible. Raid 0 requires to identically sized partitions...you are writing half of your data to one drive, and half to the other, to improve read speed. Flash cards obviously are not going to be the proper size, plus the disparity in read and write speeds are so pronounced even if you had a 80 gb falsh drive and it was technically possible it would be unstable.

    RAID drives are, by and large, a bad idea for the typical user--especially Raid 0. Because the loss of one drive is catastrophic for your data, you need to be a religious freak about backups.
     
    gerryf19, Mar 20, 2008
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  4. scythie

    scythie I died for your sins.

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    "Identically sized"? So they can be different hard drives as long as they have the same capacity? For example, one Seagate HDD and one Hitachi HDD? What about rotational speed [i.e. 7200RPM and 5400RPM]?

    Sorry newbie here :eek:
     
    scythie, Mar 20, 2008
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  5. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    You can have heterogeneous raid, but it does not work well

    ANy raid array works best when the array has all identical drives.

    You cannot put compact flash cards in raid, they do not support anything greater than udma and 16 bit instructions.

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Mar 20, 2008
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  6. gerryf19

    gerryf19 I am the walrus

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    what he said....I have made RAIDs with different drives from different manufacturers and it does work, but not as well....I will say I never made one with different rotational speeds.....it would probably work, but completely defeat the purpose of gaining a performance boost
     
    gerryf19, Mar 20, 2008
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