Ugrading - Can I Use Old Raid 0 Array?

[jazz6060]

Hello:

I built a pretty high performance system about 5 years ago containing the best Abit 875 Intel chipset mainboard, Raid 0 configured w/d Rpators and a high end ATI AWI video card of the time. Good Kingston memory (3gb) (Specs in Signature below).

Long story short, the Abit main board failed (the second one by the way). Everything else, including the Antec 550w TruePower PSU are fine. So I went about trying to replace the mainboard, in fact found one on e-bay, but it was DOA. So I want to upgrade this system with all new main components. I found out that I am going to need a new mainboard, processor, memory, PSU and video card at minimum. I guess the ATX case is still OK. Well, now I am wondering about hard drives. I have 2 WD 36 GB Raptors set in RAID 0 as the C drive. I have data I want on this array that I was hoping to use in this new set up, but I have a sinking feeling that I will not be able to use this current set of drives by simply connecting them up and booting into Windows (Win XP Home SP3). I would guess that there are drivers and other things that will be needed that may make this impossible. So if that is the case, and I do replace the "C" drive and reload Windows, will I be able to connect the old RAID 0 array into secondary sata ports and use it as slave? Sata drives don't have the jumpers to select the Master / Slave deal that Pata drives do. I juse want to be able to run these in order to pull off the photos, music, e-mail stuff. Then I can reimage them or do whatever.

So the questions is: Can I hook them up and boot right in, install whatever drivers needed for the new components, or, if not, will it work to put this array in as a "salve" or secondary drives, in order to pull files?

Any ideas?

The new board is ASUS P5Q3 Delux Intel P45 Chipset, Proc, Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 LGA775, Corsair XMS 4 Gb (2X2Gb) PC310666 DDR3 memory, Antec TPQ1000 True Power Quattro PSU and a MSI R4850 ATI Radeon PCIe 2.0X16 video (will cross fire a second one later). I know this stuff is not as "cutting edge" as my original build was with the technology 5 years ago, but now I am looking for performance on a smaller budget.

Thank you, Jazz.

[jazz6060]

Hello: Anyone out there care to comment on this. Could use the advice. Thx, Jazz...

[klc314]

I have rebuilt a RAID array under similar circumstances, but was only successful using the same controller the original array was built on. Maybe you could find another used motherboard, or add-in card with the same RAID controller, and use it just to recover your files. I doubt a different controller would recognize the existing array, but you never know till you try.

[jazz6060]

Thank you Klc314, I wondered. My old RAID0 array was connected to the Abit IC7-G motherboard's southbridge, the ICH5R. I tried replace the board. I found the same one on Ebay, bought it but it was DOA. So now I am rebuilding the system. I will reinstall windows on a new HD or array and connect the old set to another pair of sata connectors and see if the array will be recognized.

[jazz6060]

To All:

I appreciated your answers to my questions and I am on the way to getting this RAID0 array where I can see if it will be recognized. And getting this build up & running. However the road to getting there is not quite going smoothly. So an answer for this question, for you, or anyone interested in jumping would really be helpful in getting me back on this course.

I have assembled all the components, and have turned on the system. All the fans run, I get the single beep from the motherboard indicating that it has found the video and the monitor indicates it's receiving a digital signal, but I cannot see the POST or get into the BIOS as a result. The monitor looks like it's on, the view is a very dark, almost black, blue. Nothing more. I know for a fact that I have connected all the power cables etc. correctly. This board does have 2 PCI slots (the old ones) which I do have populated with a sound card and a phone modem card. I did read on the motherboard dvd instructions that if you are not receiving video or "black" monitor, that one should disconnect other cards, etc. as one or both may be creating the problem. So tonight I will remove both cards and see what I get. But I don't really think that will do it, because I believe that I am getting a signal to the monitor. Someone once told me they had a problem seeing the BIOS screen because their monitor had to high resolution to "see" the low res display of the BIOS screens. I did try an older CRT I have around here, but got the same result. Any thoughts about that? I think I posted what components I am using in this thread somewhere, but the motherboard is an ASUS P5Q3 Delux WiFi edition and the video or graphics card is a single, but cross-fire capable MSI R4850 T2D512, PCIe 2.0 512mb DDR3. The old PCI cards are Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 Platinum and a Robotics 56K modem card (a backup for broadband lan being down, which used to be frequent in my area, but could live without now). Also this motherboard is supposed to have a pretty good sound solution so if worst comes to worse, I could always go with that, dumping the Creative card too, but would rather not for now.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thank you, Jazz..

[rjs735]

Most people ( including myself ) rush in and plug everything in on a new build.

You should start out with cpu,ram & video. If this works then on to dvd/cd burner, HD etc.

This can isolate failures better than taking everything out and putting it back in phases. (although this will work as well )

[jazz6060]

Thank you for your advice rjs735, I will give this a shot tonight and let you know. One more question on this, would it matter, with this MSI Graphics card, if the monitor is not the newest, it's a Viewsoinc (I forget the model), LCD, 19" not bad bout not the HD format. I am using the digital DVI connector, not the vga one with it and it worked fine whith my ATI AWI X800 card. Would Is it possible this new graphics card is incapable of the lower resolutions or something? Thank you, Jazz.

[Alegria]

As long as you're going from ICH5R to ICH(Something higher), your RAID0 should be recognized by the Matrix storage BIOS in RAID mode, but if it was your boot drive, the driver itself won't be available in your Windows installation leaving you with a blue screen 0x7b Inaccessible Boot Device upon boot. You would have to access your old installation from a running setup with ICH5R and do some preliminary work. You have to make Windows know the new iastor.sys (the driver itself in %systemroot%\system32\drivers). You would have to copy this file there manually, then make the registry know the device by adding a key and some values to criticaldevicedatabase (see mergeide articles through Google etc.) and afterwards your system should boot up fine. Then you can install the rest of the MatrixStorage manager.

Do a forum search on this topic as well.

[jazz6060]

Originally Posted by Alegria

As long as you're going from ICH5R to ICH(Something higher), your RAID0 should be recognized by the Matrix storage BIOS in RAID mode, but if it was your boot drive, the driver itself won't be available in your Windows installation leaving you with a blue screen 0x7b Inaccessible Boot Device upon boot. You would have to access your old installation from a running setup with ICH5R and do some preliminary work. You have to make Windows know the new iastor.sys (the driver itself in %systemroot%\system32\drivers). You would have to copy this file there manually, then make the registry know the device by adding a key and some values to criticaldevicedatabase (see mergeide articles through Google etc.) and afterwards your system should boot up fine. Then you can install the rest of the MatrixStorage manager.

Do a forum search on this topic as well.

Alegria, thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Pretty complicated though. And yes, this RAID0 array was the boot drive. How about if I just start fresh; re-install windows on a new set of hard disks, a new RAID array. Then can I just connect the old set as a secondary hard drive and copy out the data I want from them? From what you say above, if I do a fresh Windows (XP) re-install, with all the correct drivers from the new ASUS board and more modern ICH10r chipset, it appears that the old RAID0 array would just be recognized by the new system as another hard dirve? That would really be OK as well, if that were the case.

Again, thank you for your post, Jazz..

[Alegria]

Can do. If you do a fresh installation on a new array, the second array will be available afterwards as an ordinary drive to the system. It won't break. You can easily copy your data off the drive then.

[jazz6060]

Alegria:

Perfect! Thank you! Jazz..

[jazz6060]

Originally Posted by Alegria

Can do. If you do a fresh installation on a new array, the second array will be available afterwards as an ordinary drive to the system. It won't break. You can easily copy your data off the drive then.

Alegria and all:

As for the booting problem I was having; I did find the exact item that caused this. I have 2 optical drives, a Plextor DVD burner and another Plextor CD burner, these both are on the single IDE channel this board has and they were configured properly as a Master - Slave. The DVD being the Master. After trial and error, I found out the DVD didn't like being the Master and ended up working fine when this relationship was reversed. It took a while to get this place and a lot of hair pulling too. Go figure.

Now back to my original reason for this post.

RAID0 Boot Drives, I have found that the new board "sees" the old RAID0 boot array, but cannot boot from it. It gets to the begining XP startup window and then resets. As you said Alegria. That's OK because I will just install Windows on a new drive or array and then connect this set as secondaries to get the data off.

But my question now is, if I create a new RAID0 array as the boot drive reusing my old 36.7GB WD Raptors which will total about 76 Gb, then have other drives added, either in RAID 1 or as single drives, which are 750 gbs apeice. Is it appropriate to only load the operating system on the RAID0 boot array and everything else, programs, data, etc on the other secondary array or discs? Does that still give you the speed / performance benefit RAID 0 gives or do all the programs have to be on the RAID 0 (the boot drive) as well? I never was really sure about that before.. What about the best configuration for video encoding for example. I know that the sensitive data should be kept on the secondary drives for safety, particularly if they are in RAID1.

Another option; I can build the boot drive, RAID 0, with the two brand new 750GB Samsung drives instead. These are 32Mb Cache, 7200 Rpm, SATA II (300 gb/s) drives. Then I would most likely lose the old Raptors altogether and have everything on the new drives in RAID 0 (1.5 Tbs) with a good backup program running to an external or other drive. I also have been reading about the Intel Storage Matrix where I could have RAID 0 and RAID 1 on this same set of 2 drives as well. Wow a lot of choices to consider. Maybe you may have some insight on this?

I hope you don't mind the extra questions.. But you have been very helpful. Anyone else too, if you are intersted.

Thank you, Jazz..

Replacement Components to the setup in my signature:
ASUS P5Q3 Delux WiFi LGA 775, P45 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 2.83 Gb
Corsair XMS 4Gb (2X2Gb) DDR3 TW3X4G1333C9DHX
Antec PSU, TPQ-1000 True Power Quattro 1000Watt.
MSI R4850 512 Radeon PCIe 2.0X16 grahics
2 Samsung Spinpoint SATA II FI 750 Gb HDDs, 7200 rpm, 32 Mb cache.
and the rest, less the old video, CPU, PSU, memory and one DVD/CD reader.

[Alegria]

Originally Posted by jazz6060

Alegria and all:



But my question now is, if I create a new RAID0 array as the boot drive reusing my old 36.7GB WD Raptors which will total about 76 Gb, then have other drives added, either in RAID 1 or as single drives, which are 750 gbs apeice. Is it appropriate to only load the operating system on the RAID0 boot array and everything else, programs, data, etc on the other secondary array or discs? Does that still give you the speed / performance benefit RAID 0 gives or do all the programs have to be on the RAID 0 (the boot drive) as well? I never was really sure about that before. What about the best configuration for video encoding for example. I know that the sensitive data should be kept on the secondary drives for safety, particularly if they are in RAID1.

Another option; I can build the boot drive, RAID 0, with the two brand new 750GB Samsung drives instead. These are 32Mb Cache, 7200 Rpm, SATA II (300 gb/s) drives. Then I would most likely lose the old Raptors altogether and have everything on the new drives in RAID 0 (1.5 Tbs) with a good backup program running to an external or other drive. I also have been reading about the Intel Storage Matrix where I could have RAID 0 and RAID 1 on this same set of 2 drives as well. Wow a lot of choices to consider. Maybe you may have some insight on this?

Hi there,

Having the Operating System only on RAID0 improves boot time by a couple of seconds only and overall performance doesn't really get a gain. If you want applications to be snappier (loading and using) they would have to reside on the RAID0 array too. But once they are loaded, only a limited amount of disk I/O occurs concerning the application itself. When working with applications like Photoshop or Video Editing, very much depends on the size of the files you're working with and memory/CPU performance. It would be nice to have a RAID0 for files you are working with e.g. large uncut video material. Your video editing program would have faster access to the file. The result should be stored on a drive which is not prone to failure and data loss therefore a RAID1 would be a good choice.

It's a known fact that a system CAN be a little faster if you put the pagefile on a different drive (not partition) than the OS. Depending on the amount of RAM you have and the memory footprint of the applications you are working with paging can still occur. But what would that mean? Put the applications and the OS on a RAID0 drive and the working data and pagefile on a second RAID0 which leaves you unprotected in case of failure of one of the drives.

That is not really an option to consider.

Using matrix storage manager would give you the mixed RAID option having 0 and 1 on two drives and could be the best choice. This will result in 750GB usable capacity. I would not rely on having a 1.5 TB RAID0 and a backup which is possibly not up to date.

Another interesting thing may be a RAID5 array if you get another 750GB Samsung. You would have a fault tolerant RAID with distributed parity so either one of the three drives can fail without data loss. The only thing you would see would be a warning about a degraded array, telling you which drive has failed. You would have 1.5 TB capacity and peace of mind. It is rahther unlikely that two drives fail at the same time. If you are really paranoid get a 4th drive and keep it stowed away in case of a needed replacement. That does not exclude the need of an appropriate backup. Backing up is always needed.

Well, it really depends.

[jazz6060]

Originally Posted by Alegria

Hi there,

Having the Operating System only on RAID0 improves boot time by a couple of seconds only and overall performance doesn't really get a gain. If you want applications to be snappier (loading and using) they would have to reside on the RAID0 array too. But once they are loaded, only a limited amount of disk I/O occurs concerning the application itself. When working with applications like Photoshop or Video Editing, very much depends on the size of the files you're working with and memory/CPU performance. It would be nice to have a RAID0 for files you are working with e.g. large uncut video material. Your video editing program would have faster access to the file. The result should be stored on a drive which is not prone to failure and data loss therefore a RAID1 would be a good choice.

It's a known fact that a system CAN be a little faster if you put the pagefile on a different drive (not partition) than the OS. Depending on the amount of RAM you have and the memory footprint of the applications you are working with paging can still occur. But what would that mean? Put the applications and the OS on a RAID0 drive and the working data and pagefile on a second RAID0 which leaves you unprotected in case of failure of one of the drives.

That is not really an option to consider.

Using matrix storage manager would give you the mixed RAID option having 0 and 1 on two drives and could be the best choice. This will result in 750GB usable capacity. I would not rely on having a 1.5 TB RAID0 and a backup which is possibly not up to date.

Another interesting thing may be a RAID5 array if you get another 750GB Samsung. You would have a fault tolerant RAID with distributed parity so either one of the three drives can fail without data loss. The only thing you would see would be a warning about a degraded array, telling you which drive has failed. You would have 1.5 TB capacity and peace of mind. It is rahther unlikely that two drives fail at the same time. If you are really paranoid get a 4th drive and keep it stowed away in case of a needed replacement. That does not exclude the need of an appropriate backup. Backing up is always needed.

Well, it really depends.

Hello Alegria;

Again, very informative. Thank you, I will consider what you have written and get this done. I am kind of interested the Matrix Storage solution. Does this give you the speed "bump" that RAID0 does?

Thx, Jazz..

[Alegria]

See this for some information on Matrix RAID and some real life performance. Bear in mind that the RAID0 in Matrix RAID is not fault tolerant. Depending on your configuration you can either assign more space to the RAID1 and have less space left for RAID0 or vice versa. Ah, I mixed the capacity calculations, RAID1 only with two 750GB drives leaves you with 750GB total available capacity. Matrix RAID will leave you more capacity depending on array sizes.

Intel's Matrix RAID explored - The Tech Report - Page 1

Tech ARP - Intel Matrix RAID Guide