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"RAID Hard Drives Defaging - Must be complicated"

I was defraging my Hard Drive when I though of this, how do RAIDed Hard Drives defrag. As you may or may not know, RAIDed Hard Drives work but having 2 or more Hard Drives acting as 1 which write/read symitaiously to increase performance. So the whole system of RAID is based on having fragments on different Hard Drives, which I though surely creates 2 problems:
1. They must be hell complicated for your PC to Defrag
2. Surely if they have been Defraged they would run slower than before, as the whole of the file being read/writen would be on one drive. It would still be quicker than a normal Hard Drive as it could still access 2 or more files at once quicker than a normal system,.

Anyone have an expericance with defraging RAIDed drives, as I'm interested to what it would be like to do?

Also, while I'm on the subject do you think I should get a new Hard Drive as I think my 40GB ATA/66 is bottlenecking my relativly new 2.4GHz (overclocked to 2.6GHz at the mo) P4 system?

Cheers
S.A.

AMD_MAN wrote:
> Yeh You won't really notice to much differance whilst running around
> windows and on the internet but if you throw around large files and
> open large files then you will notice some speed differance's, But if
> i were you i would get larger capacity hard drive as they are pretty
> cheap these days (ive just got myself 2 250gb SATA Maxtor hdd's for a
> Raid Setup) You can get an 80gb good hdd for around £60 these
> days, if it's speed you want the you may want to upgrade you ram or
> cpu.

I really need some more RAM, only got 256Mb at the mo.

Yeh You won't really notice to much differance whilst running around windows and on the internet but if you throw around large files and open large files then you will notice some speed differance's, But if i were you i would get larger capacity hard drive as they are pretty cheap these days (ive just got myself 2 250gb SATA Maxtor hdd's for a Raid Setup) You can get an 80gb good hdd for around £60 these days, if it's speed you want the you may want to upgrade you ram or cpu.

Colin

taka-Q wrote:
> So its not worth getting a new HD?

It's not going to speed up your computer all that much. Data capacity should be your primary motive behind buying another disk, not speed.

AMD_MAN wrote:
> True, if you don't already have a SATA port on your motherboard then
> it wouldnt really be worth it.
>
> Colin

So its not worth getting a new HD?

True, if you don't already have a SATA port on your motherboard then it wouldnt really be worth it.

Colin

taka-Q wrote:
> Anyone have an expericance with defraging RAIDed drives, as I'm
> interested to what it would be like to do?

While I haven't tried it, I can't imagine it'd be any more difficult than a single drive. RAID is a different layer of abstraction to the file system (which is what you're defragmenting). Windows sees the RAID array as a single drive, and that is what it defragments.

> Also, while I'm on the subject do you think I should get a new Hard
> Drive as I think my 40GB ATA/66 is bottlenecking my relativly new
> 2.4GHz (overclocked to 2.6GHz at the mo) P4 system?

Personally I wouldn't replace it with another PATA (non-SATA) drive unless you needed the extra space.

AMD_MAN wrote:
> if you are going to use the old hard disk drive as well that you
> can't stick it on the same IDE channel as the new drive as then the
> new drive will only run at a max of ata66, You are also better off
> going for more than 40gb as the price differance is tiny, some 40gb
> drives are actually more expensive than the 60 gb versions.

Hmm... I still think I will go for a 40GB, but would it be worth investing in an SATA PCI controler card and an SATA drive?

You can get an ATA133 one but it won't make much differance, i suppose it will have better performance than the ata100 one but only fractionaly, The 8mb Cache actually makes a big differance, Remeber if you are going to use the old hard disk drive as well that you can't stick it on the same IDE channel as the new drive as then the new drive will only run at a max of ata66, You are also better off going for more than 40gb as the price differance is tiny, some 40gb drives are actually more expensive than the 60 gb versions.

Colin

tigamilla wrote:
> LOL!!One man thread!!

I know, it was late and nowone else was on.

LOL!!One man thread!!