9261 RAID. Hardware or Software

I am trying to figure out if this is the right laptop for me, and I am hoping you 9261/9260 owners can help me out. Is the raid configuration hardware or software based, and, yes there is a difference.

Also does anyone know of a re-seller of the 901c that changes the case so its more of a matte finish. Honestly the gloss is one of things holding me back from this thing, along with all the USB ports on the right side, where I would have my mouse.

Any suggestions or comments would help.

 

The raid configuration is hardware. Not sure of a retailer that uses a different cas but you could have it painted in a matte finish if you chose to. I do agree that usb on the right is difficult but after having been through mine there was not much of a choice. I would rather have the usb there than the DVD drive. As for a good retailer I would recomend XOTIC PC my dealings with them have been very positive to this point. I did a lot of research when I bought mine and they have a good reputation around the internet as well. If you have any other questions just ask.

 

The RAID is software, not hardware. The ICH8R + CPU is doing the RAID crunching, not a dedicated RAID card. When something is "Software", it entails the usage of the CPU to complete the task. Example: CPU physics would be software, while an addon card would be hardware.

 

There is a chip that handles the RAID setup and it is seperate to the CPU that runs everything else...

This is what people usually call hardware raid.

When someone usually says software RAID, they mean the OS is calculating it.

And the setup is really fast...

I have 3 x Seagate Momentus 160gb 7200rpm drives setup in a RAID 0... It is really fast...


Joe

 

I have been told that software raid, while faster, is less reliable. Not really very informed on RAID. But I don't think most people are. Because people hear, "Its so fast!" and think, ooh it must be good. Like a dodge viper. people just don't know any better.

 

I know mine has the intel 82801 HR/HH/HO sata raid controller. You can also download the management software from the sager site to give you some flexibility for it as well. You can get this from intel site as also but it is a little more difficult to find.

 

Software Raid is not faster.... When you have a seperate dedicated chip that does the RAID it will be way faster than an OS managing RAID... Think about it...

Oviously your not very well informed because I also have an 800 horse Dodge Viper that is very fast... The problem is that you have to be a very good driver to drive the car.... You probably own a vette with traction control..


So far your 0 for 2....

Joe

 

Ok well I was just reading an article, which I will try and find to link to, that explained that software raid that taxes the cpu/os, is actually faster, with todays systems. Doesnt make much sense to me, but I really don't know much about raid, other that what I read.

haha thats awesome. Really didnt think anyone would have a viper. I know its fast, I have driven one. It however is not a precision machine. After driving a BMW M3, or a Mercedes SLK 200K, I know what a great car feels like. I don't care as much about speed, as I do mechanical perfection.

Haha the viper is like a pinto on crack. Though I hate most american cars, so don't take is personally. Japanese are what I like. Not the fastest or most beautiful, but they will keep going for years and years.

 

if you want to keep going for years and years, may I suggest RAID 5?

 

I was wondering about raid 5. If you have any suggestions on a good article explaining this, that would rock. I will look it up also.

 

M3's are definitely overrated.. My viper will spank that and slk in 1/4 mile and the track.. I have the newer version which is much better overall performance than the older one....

It really is a true road racing car... do some research...

And I have owned jap cars.. there alright if your 5 foot nothing..

I had a modified s2000 that was really cool.. But my viper still blows it away...
Ill take you for a ride sometime if your in the tampa area...

Here's some info on RAID.. Here you go...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

If you want to know more just ask here...

Joe

 

Here's a couple quick bits about RAID..

Hardware Raid with a chip that manages it.. is faster than OS running it..
There is too much overhead in running RAID through the OS.

RAID 0 - Is the fastest, but the most prone to failure...
You need at least 2 drives to implement this...
It will give you the most space... basically add up the amount of drives your putting in.

The only problem is that if you lose one drive... the whole array is gone...
So make sure you backup...

The performace is the fastest you can get...
Because hard drives are mechanical they take time is writing/reading and accessing the platters...

With RAID 0, you can read and write at the sametime which can give you up to 2 times the performance.... Not all the time..but most...

With RAID 1, it reduces your risk of failure....
You can only use 2 disks and everything that gets written to one disk gets written to the other.... This is oviously slower than RAID 0. You also only get the amount of disk space on one drive...
The nice part is if you lose one drive, you have another to use......

And also you have RAID 5, this is like RAID 0, but a certain check of disk is used as Parity... You need at least 3 disks.. and you lose about 1/3 to 1/4 disk space... What nice about this is you get more disk space than RAID 1 and if you lose one drive your still good... But if you lose 2 drives than your SOL...

I personally go with RAID 0 and make sure I back up quite a bit...

I need the performance because I use virtualization using VMware...
I want my VM's being as fast as they can be...

HTH,

Joe

 

That wiki article is a little off. Software RAID ins't being run by the OS, it is using CPU cycles to do the calculations.

 

Theres many kinds... I just picked the first thing off of Google to give some info....

Right now software RAID.. I mean using windows to do the RAID calculations..
When there is a chip on the motherboard... We consider that hardware raid....

Joe

 

I do

Raid stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

On a modern PC you can have four kinds of raid settings:

1. Raid 0. This isn't raid because there is no redundancy, hence the 0. It is a stripe set, so all data will be written to the disks in small stripes. Think of something like 256kB to disk 1, 256kB to disk 2, 256kB to disk 3, 256kB to disk 4, 256kB to disk 1, and so on. Very fast, and also highly recommended if you want to loose all of your data. If one disk fails, all of your data is lost. No one with any knowledge of storage will ever use it unless the data on the disk doesn't matter very much and can be replaced easily.
2. Raid 1, a mirror set. Two (or more disks) are mirrored. Very save, because you can loose one disk and still have all the data. Reads can be quite fast since they are spread over both disks. Writes are a bit slower, since both disks have to be written. In a raid 1 set you always have the net capacity of one disk.
3. Raid 1 + 0, also named Raid 10. Can be used with four or more disks. A combination of both previous raid types. The proper way to set it up is making a raid 0 set of several raid 1 sets. That way you can loose one disk out of every mirror set (half of all disks), and no data is lost. If you have a mirror set of two stripes, only one disk in both stripes has to fail, and both stripes are gone incl. all data. Raid 10 is the vanilla raid version in high performance computing. As with raid 1, the net capacity is only half of the sum of the capacity of all disks.
4. Raid 5. The storage capacity of a raid 5 set is calculated as N+1. A raid 5 set of four 500GB disks has a net capacity of 3 x 500GB=1.5TB (N=3). The remaining capacity is used for parity information that is spread over all disks. If you loose one disk, all data is still valid and you can replace the disk. Raid 5 should have the same read performance as a raid 0 set. The write performance is quite poor because extra reads, parity calculations and an extra write have to be done for every write from the application. The built-in raid 5 capability in standard PC chip sets has a very poor performance indeed. Use it only if you don't care about the slow write performance and you need to store a lot of data.

Keep in mind that all disks in a raid set should have the same capacity!

 

The RAID on the D901C is 'fakeraid' it is NOT hardware. Fakeraid is better than software only raid. It does have dedicated channels.

Hardware>Fakeraid>software

There you go. Just rest assured that you will get better performance than someone with software raid.