How to get RAID 0 working on any laptop that has 2 drives.

I struggled for months on this and despite people saying it was impossible to do with 2 drives etc and on a notebook without a raid controller etc etc.

this howto was for my m1710 but will work on any laptop that can have 2 drives and doesn't officially support RAID.

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread211682.html

I want to get the word out. because there is absolutely nothing about this on the web.

enjoy

 

there are software RAID alternatives. RAID-1 is easy to do with software.

I know of SoftRAID... for Mac OSX... which does the job for RAID-0.

And I believe there is a FakeRAID around as well.

 

this is for windows though.

and its not fake.

it's real stripped drives.

and you can do it with 2 only. not 3. on a laptop as well.

you get wicked improvements i get 120mb/s read/write just as good as hardware raid 0.

theres lots of ways to do it on pc's. with more than 2 drives.

there is little to zilch on the net of how to do this on a laptop with 2 drives. and no hardware raid support.

 

I'm not a member of the other forum you are linking to so I'll just post here.

As I said in my other post be aware that Hardware and Software raid are different.

See:

http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/14B2FD84-F7A0-4AC5-A07A-214123EA3DD6/0/4423_SW_HWRAID_10.pdf

For more information.

In software raid your other hardware has to pick up the slack that is no longer handled by the raid controller. Also if your system crashes data can be lost that exists only in the software raid's write cache, as opposed to hardware raid.

Anyway the article explains it a lot better than I can. I'm not saying Software raid sucks by any means, just be carefull telling people it's the same thing.

 

i know the diffs dude. but nowadays with computers and processors very good and powerful there is little to no differences.

 

it's a performance tweak. for people who have no option for hardware raid.

we use software raid for years on our servers at work on linux and it works
fine in raid 5 and we have never ever ever had problems.

there still is backup with the extra drive and if there is problems your data is ok.

anyways. i just posted this because no one else has.

there is like nothing on the whole net about this. maybe 1 post on 1 forum with a little info. that's all. I searched every corner of the net and nobody has done this. there is was no info on getting real stripped raid 0 on a laptop with 2 drives that doesn't support raid 0.

that's all.

i'm sure some people will find it interesting. I brought it up because alot of people don't know you can get raid 0,1,5 on a laptop that doesn't support it on a hardware level.

 

There is not little to no difference. There are major differences. Like I said you may just want to make people aware of them when you reccomend they do it. For instance if windows becomes corrupt, you lose everything on your hard drive. You can't just reinstall windows or boot it up from another medium and have your data, because windows was handling your raid, etc.

The extra drive in a raid 5 means nothing if the OS raid gets corrupted. The raid 5 only matters if a hard drive fails.

I've seen plenty of software raids fail in my years in teh industry. Like I said it doesn't mean it's a bad solution but people should know what they are getting in to.

Like I said there are many differences, software raid has it's benefits for sure. I just don't want people to implement it on their machines under false pretenses.

 

do it or don't like overclocking. yes you get a + but you can wreck your card.

your hdd could fail with or without raid.

or windows could corrupt without raid.

yes if your hdd fails even with hardware raid 0, you loose everything

if 1 hdd fails in raid 0 you lose everything.



obviously....

 

if your hard drives are raided through windows (which has been available since NT 4.0) and one fails...you lose windows. if you at least have a chipset that is still using your CPU to do all of the calculations (this is the way every onboard raid chipset works, without a standalone card) then the array can be repaired. standalone cards are the best solution, and are the fastest, and most expensive, as well.

Yes, you can run a "fake" raid, or do RAID through the Windows OS, but when one of your drives fail, windows will not boot. the data will still be there, so you can retrieve it, but it still requires a re-install, or at the very least, a repair.

 

obviously. again.

but this is for people who for the love of god don't have a raid controller.

 

and yes it has been available since NT, but not available in mobile devices. and is disabled for laptops.

my howto explains how to enable dynamic drives in windows for a laptop.

from microsoft:
# Just like anything else, with certain advances there are certain limitations and drawbacks. Laptop Limitation. Dynamic disks are not supported on laptops, removable disks, such as Jaz or ORB drives, detachable disks that use Universal Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interfaces, or on drives connected to a shared SCSI bus. On laptops you do not even see the option to convert basic disks to dynamic within the Disk Management tool.

 

why do you want RAID-0... when you do not have a hardware controller.

the gain is very minimal from my past experiences... using SoftRAID for OSX.

software RAID is really only useful for data redundancy (RAID-1).... stripe RAID'ing does not really do a whole lot in increase HDD performance (5-15% at best)

 

i give up. you obviously didn't even read the howto

regular is 45mb/s and 13ms seek

after my raid 0 i get over 120/mb s Read/Write.

first tests were 90mb/s read/write. 8ms seek

yah. that's 5% at best

you must be doin something wrong.

i mean ya try and contibute.. and whattaya get.

F,it

 

we use software raid for years on our servers at work on linux and it works
fine in raid 5 and we have never ever ever had problems.

You might be running software raid in Linux, but most probably, you're Linux kernel that boot is located in a mini partition called /boot (~100MB). This partition is generally NOT in a software raid. The reason is that it needs to boot first from this partition, because it will then handle the software raid from the rest of the disks.

My best practice for Linux would usually be to use software raid1 for the OS system files and programs, and then if need be, make a software raid0 with the rest of the disks for data. That way you have both the redundancy for the OS and speed for the data.

 

I can see no use for dynamic disk period...desktop or laptop. I understand that someone, somwhere will have a problem solved by using DD. I also understand doing it, writing a guide, just to do what supposedly cannot be done. That being said, I think a lot of people are scratching their heads on DD and SW RAID...what's the point again?

 

you wouldn't understand you see having a hardware raid controller blocks you from seeing the benefit. ;(

people without the ability to use Hardware Raid have a benefit.

 

howdy Diefool / dexgo

This does work for XP (as proven on the other forum thread), and going up to ~120MB/s is great

With 320gb drives now its simple to have enough space for a paired 100gb dynamic partition on both drives

As far as data concerns, whats the difference between this and hardware raid0? I don't see what the resistance is?

I get 50-60Mb/s conventionally with an 320gb 5400rpm drive. I'd love to do this in vista64 when someone hacks it from dexgo's work on XP

great high impact find

 

heya z

don't worry, we know it's a good find.

i dunno bout this place.

there must be somthing in the water.

luckily I brought my own bottled....

i will head back over to nbf/df 17-20 before i run out.