Here's what happened:  I had a PC set up with a Raid 0 in vista that was
not the boot drive.  I was using the Raid 0 array for video storage and
high speed large file access.  I have all the files backed up, no
worries there, I wanted the speed and didn't care about data redundancy.
I would rather games load faster and movies transcode and edit snappier
rather than lose files which I can easily re-install and such.  Anyways,
the Raid 0 array was set up in Vista x64 business edition as a secondary
array, not the boot drive array.  I now have a new system and would like
to simply pluck out the two drives and transplant them into the new PC
and set the array back up in vista x64 business as a secondary raid
array again, but would like to not have to hassle with re-installing and
copying a terabyte of data back onto the array.    Is there any way to
simply tell vista that the two drives it sees are in a raid 0 array,
tell it the settings they were at, and have it simply recognize them as
a single unit and function as a raid 0 without having to reformat them? 
I'm somewhat confused at how to go about this using vista's disk
management utility.


-- 
Lekko
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

This is probably not possible. If it is possible you would have to consult 
the manual for the RAID controller in the new system for how to import an 
existing array. Even if this possibility exists it probably still won't work 
unless the RAID controllers from both systems are the same.

-- 
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/




"Lekko"  wrote in message 
news:Lekko.3dva02@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> Here's what happened:  I had a PC set up with a Raid 0 in vista that was
> not the boot drive.  I was using the Raid 0 array for video storage and
> high speed large file access.  I have all the files backed up, no
> worries there, I wanted the speed and didn't care about data redundancy.
> I would rather games load faster and movies transcode and edit snappier
> rather than lose files which I can easily re-install and such.  Anyways,
> the Raid 0 array was set up in Vista x64 business edition as a secondary
> array, not the boot drive array.  I now have a new system and would like
> to simply pluck out the two drives and transplant them into the new PC
> and set the array back up in vista x64 business as a secondary raid
> array again, but would like to not have to hassle with re-installing and
> copying a terabyte of data back onto the array.    Is there any way to
> simply tell vista that the two drives it sees are in a raid 0 array,
> tell it the settings they were at, and have it simply recognize them as
> a single unit and function as a raid 0 without having to reformat them?
> I'm somewhat confused at how to go about this using vista's disk
> management utility.
>
>
> -- 
> Lekko
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

Well, I would agree with you except it isn't a hardware raid, it is a
software raid managed by Vista.    Since it is a software raid....  it
should, in theory, be able to be rebuilt and function the same
regardless of controllers and drivers.  One would think..  The only
thing is Vista's disk management won't allow you to set up a raid on
drives that are not reformatted.  I was hoping to simply restore the
raid without having to reformat.  Perhaps there is an other way..


-- 
Lekko
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

I highly recommend you don't use software RAID and in particular software 
RAID 0. You will lose data because of it eventually. The overhead of 
software RAID will be more than any speed increase in any case.

-- 
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/


"Lekko"  wrote in message 
news:Lekko.3dwcw7@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> Well, I would agree with you except it isn't a hardware raid, it is a
> software raid managed by Vista.    Since it is a software raid....  it
> should, in theory, be able to be rebuilt and function the same
> regardless of controllers and drivers.  One would think..  The only
> thing is Vista's disk management won't allow you to set up a raid on
> drives that are not reformatted.  I was hoping to simply restore the
> raid without having to reformat.  Perhaps there is an other way..
>
>
> -- 
> Lekko
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

While we can sit here all day discussing optimal and ideal situations,
the RAID controller I was using wouldn't allow multiple Raid 0 arrays
simultaneously, hence why I had to have the backup raid and output be
software controlled.  While I understand that software solutions are
slower with overhead and are issue-prone, the alternative would have
been a single-drive solution, and none of them had the throughput
necessary to deal with the throughputs I needed.  besides, I was using a
quad core that wasn't seeing 100% load across all four cores, so one
core always had resources to cover it.  Anyways.. I'm going to end up
using R-studio to virtualize the raid and pull the data off the old
array onto a new set of drives (single drives now (was 2x320 now going
to 1x750), might set up in a raid 5 once I can afford a good controller,
budget permitting.)  Thanks... for the criticism and no actual help.


-- 
Lekko
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Sorry you took it that way. I honestly feel that the best help in this 
situation is to recommend you use a different RAID solution. This is a peer 
to peer support group. All you will find here is opinions. I gave you mine 
:-)

I have seen too many cases of lost data due to both RAID 0 and software 
RAID. Combining the two is not something I would contemplate in any 
scenario. If you need that kind of throughput then I recommend SCSI or SAS 
drives with an appropriate controller.

-- 
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/


"Lekko"  wrote in message 
news:Lekko.3dwz42@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> While we can sit here all day discussing optimal and ideal situations,
> the RAID controller I was using wouldn't allow multiple Raid 0 arrays
> simultaneously, hence why I had to have the backup raid and output be
> software controlled.  While I understand that software solutions are
> slower with overhead and are issue-prone, the alternative would have
> been a single-drive solution, and none of them had the throughput
> necessary to deal with the throughputs I needed.  besides, I was using a
> quad core that wasn't seeing 100% load across all four cores, so one
> core always had resources to cover it.  Anyways.. I'm going to end up
> using R-studio to virtualize the raid and pull the data off the old
> array onto a new set of drives (single drives now (was 2x320 now going
> to 1x750), might set up in a raid 5 once I can afford a good controller,
> budget permitting.)  Thanks... for the criticism and no actual help.
>
>
> -- 
> Lekko
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

Software raid is a bottleneck and IMO counter productive
If your mobo doesn't support the raid solution you require use a raid card, 
decent raid cards retail from $300 upwards
I know not a solution to your request, but something to be born in mind for 
the future.

"Lekko"  wrote in message 
news:Lekko.3dwz42@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> While we can sit here all day discussing optimal and ideal situations,
> the RAID controller I was using wouldn't allow multiple Raid 0 arrays
> simultaneously, hence why I had to have the backup raid and output be
> software controlled.  While I understand that software solutions are
> slower with overhead and are issue-prone, the alternative would have
> been a single-drive solution, and none of them had the throughput
> necessary to deal with the throughputs I needed.  besides, I was using a
> quad core that wasn't seeing 100% load across all four cores, so one
> core always had resources to cover it.  Anyways.. I'm going to end up
> using R-studio to virtualize the raid and pull the data off the old
> array onto a new set of drives (single drives now (was 2x320 now going
> to 1x750), might set up in a raid 5 once I can afford a good controller,
> budget permitting.)  Thanks... for the criticism and no actual help.
>
>
> -- 
> Lekko
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

In message <u4nCTI0#IHA.3928@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl> "DL"
<address@invalid> wrote:

>Software raid is a bottleneck and IMO counter productive
>If your mobo doesn't support the raid solution you require use a raid card, 
>decent raid cards retail from $300 upwards

This really depends on your needs.  RAID-1 and RAID-5 are definitely far
slower, although if redundancy is more important then performance, the
penalty might be worth it (although I can't imagine any case where
RAID-1 would be the way to go, unless you only wanted two physical
disks)

RAID-0 however, is a different ballpark.  As long as your controller can
keep up, it really shouldn't matter if the striping is being done by
software or hardware.

Calculating the stripes and then queuing the writes can takes some CPU time. 
Add in the fact that the SATA controller itself also takes some CPU time and 
software RAID 0 loses a lot of the supposed performance gains. A proper RAID 
controller has it's own CPU and does bus mastering so the CPU is free to do 
other things. The OP mentioned he wanted performance for movie editing and 
movie transcoding. These are both CPU intensive in and of themselves. Using 
the CPU for RAID 0 at the same time may actually slow the overall process 
down even if the actual disk read/writes are marginally faster.
-- 
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/


"DevilsPGD"  wrote in message 
news:e83v9459tqaq5g98k6auusmrdmoegq2ejs@4ax.com...
> In message <u4nCTI0#IHA.3928@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl> "DL"
> <address@invalid> wrote:
>
>>Software raid is a bottleneck and IMO counter productive
>>If your mobo doesn't support the raid solution you require use a raid 
>>card,
>>decent raid cards retail from $300 upwards
>
> This really depends on your needs.  RAID-1 and RAID-5 are definitely far
> slower, although if redundancy is more important then performance, the
> penalty might be worth it (although I can't imagine any case where
> RAID-1 would be the way to go, unless you only wanted two physical
> disks)
>
> RAID-0 however, is a different ballpark.  As long as your controller can
> keep up, it really shouldn't matter if the striping is being done by
> software or hardware.

In message <ObhopP2#IHA.2060@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl> "Kerry Brown"
<kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote:

>Calculating the stripes and then queuing the writes can takes some CPU time. 
>Add in the fact that the SATA controller itself also takes some CPU time and 
>software RAID 0 loses a lot of the supposed performance gains. A proper RAID 
>controller has it's own CPU and does bus mastering so the CPU is free to do 
>other things. The OP mentioned he wanted performance for movie editing and 
>movie transcoding. These are both CPU intensive in and of themselves. Using 
>the CPU for RAID 0 at the same time may actually slow the overall process 
>down even if the actual disk read/writes are marginally faster.

Indeed -- Hardware RAID-0 is generally better then software RAID-0, as
long as you have a halfway decent controller.

Unfortunately, some of the lower end RAID-0 controllers perform far
worse then software RAID-0 on a better drive controller, and most modern
motherboards have reasonably decent onboard drive controllers these days
(at least sufficient to outperform the underlying drives)

I'm also not seeing any bus mastering improvements due to RAID here as
long as the underlying drive controller is bus mastering capable.  Am I
missing something?

I did solve the overall situation, and for the new build I will be using
a dedicated raid controller.  The issue isn't as important today since
drive speeds have gone up to where they need to be.  In the 320 drives,
you could only hit peak throughput for the outermost portions of any
disk platter, so with RAID 0 you could actually use more than only the
outermost segments of the drive.  Like I said, the board I was using
supported raid 0, just not multiple sets at the same time.  Also, the
encoding I was using was not multi-threaded, so it only took up a single
core, leaving the other three cores mostly free, so I wasn't too
concerned.    I had data backed up redundantly across the raids as well
in the slower segments that were unusable speed-wise.  As far as
recovery went, I could easily recover the software raid set, but neither
of the hardware raids.    Now that newer drives have better throughput,
I will be moving back to single drive solutions and use a raid card if I
need more speed.  Luckily, our research is done (what we were looking
into at least) on GPU video transcoding.  Thanks though.


-- 
Lekko
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

"DevilsPGD"  wrote in message 
news:3510a4decskn3r4qqml1lhme5pg1m7gfuc@4ax.com...
> In message <ObhopP2#IHA.2060@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl> "Kerry Brown"
> <kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote:
>
>>Calculating the stripes and then queuing the writes can takes some CPU 
>>time.
>>Add in the fact that the SATA controller itself also takes some CPU time 
>>and
>>software RAID 0 loses a lot of the supposed performance gains. A proper 
>>RAID
>>controller has it's own CPU and does bus mastering so the CPU is free to 
>>do
>>other things. The OP mentioned he wanted performance for movie editing and
>>movie transcoding. These are both CPU intensive in and of themselves. 
>>Using
>>the CPU for RAID 0 at the same time may actually slow the overall process
>>down even if the actual disk read/writes are marginally faster.
>
> Indeed -- Hardware RAID-0 is generally better then software RAID-0, as
> long as you have a halfway decent controller.
>
> Unfortunately, some of the lower end RAID-0 controllers perform far
> worse then software RAID-0 on a better drive controller, and most modern
> motherboards have reasonably decent onboard drive controllers these days
> (at least sufficient to outperform the underlying drives)

I agree. Some low cost and onboard RAID controllers are really just software 
RAID as the system CPU still does the RAID calculations. With some of them 
the manufacturer's driver is less efficient than the built in Windows RAID 
support and thus slower than pure software RAID.

>
> I'm also not seeing any bus mastering improvements due to RAID here as
> long as the underlying drive controller is bus mastering capable.  Am I
> missing something?

No.

-- 
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/