RE: Using WindowsXP to Make RAID 5 Happen

["Ian Lowe" <ian.lowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Phil - at this point, would it not be a lot safer to remove the firewire
drives from their caddies, and "go native"?

You remember how much I bitched/whined/moaned about the Rocketraid 404 card
in the past - since the firmware got sorted out, that card has been utterly
stable in my media server (and on NT4 server of all things). I had a
genuine bona-fide disk failure (rather than a sync loss) and it coped
perfectly.

I'm now at the limits of my first build (the heady heights of .6Tb, 4x200Gb
Raid 5) and am looking at one of the coolermaster Stacker cases (ten bays,
seven of them front loadable)

The RR404 only has four controllers on board, hence 8 drives - I believe
that you can run two of them in a PC though.

I'm just thinking, that's a lot of pain to go through, and I can't help but
think you wouldn't have the same hell on straight IDE rather than firewire.

Ian.

-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Phil
Harris
Sent: 04 August 2005 23:45
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Using WindowsXP to Make RAID 5 Happen


> Do you know if there is any way I can check whether I have
> been having any disconnects/reconnects/rebuilds?

Yup - the whole lot drops offline and then (in my case with 2 arrays of 8 x
160Gb drives each) would then take about a day to rebuild.

> It would be a pain if I lost the data, but not a disaster as
> I have all the films on DVD's and the music and pictures are
> backed up elsewhere.

That's what I told myself...

...but after ripping my entire collection of DVDs for the fourth time
(about
350-400 of them at the last count) the novelty wore off a tad!

> Guess I need to investigate other strategies -:(

At the moment I'm looking at Macs and - whether it's possible to run
UnionFS
(or similar) on them...

Phil