Computer guys..

[hondafox440]

Anyone know anything about SCSI? I'm in the process of upgrading my server (file and web). Right now it has a 9.1 GB SCSI boot drive and a 47GB SCSI storage drive. What I want to do is have several drives acting as one drive. What I plan to do is add 2 more 47GB SCSI drives, so instead of having D:/ as a 47GB drive, E:/ as a 47 and F:/ as a 47, I just want D:/ as a 141GB, so it's like a combo of all of them. I know there is a way to do this, but I am unsure of the details. Is it RAID, or daisy chaining? Can my current SCSI controller do this (Adaptec AHA-2940UW PCI)? The PC is running on Windows XP Pro.

Thanks in advance. Any help (links, etc) is appreciated, or if anyone can point me to a better forum to ask this at.

[remlapr]

What you're talking about doing is called a drive array(multiple physical disk appearing to the OS as one). There are different versions of Raid. Most common is Raid 1 - which is mirroring of two drives and Raid 5. Raid 5 is sort of the same thing, but spanned across multiple drives. The idea is that you have three drives and if at anytime 1 drive fails you won't loose any data. The downside is that you don't actually get the total of the three disk as usable space, only the total of two drive because the information to rebuild any one single drive must always be present and spread across the other two. You can do this using software only, but your system will take a performance hit. The right way to do it would be to buy a three channel scsi raid controller card, then the processing of the data is handles by the card, not by your cpu.

O.K., my head hurts now :huh

[hondafox440]

So you're saying this can be done with software? If so, where can I get it? If not, what SCSI card will I need? The comp is a 1200MHz Duron w/ 684MB PC133 SDRAM.

[remlapr]

Not sure, I believe with XP it may even be built into the OS now. We do everything using cards, no businesses do it using software because of the performance difference. Just google it for something like "raid 5 software only" of something...

[OCCRA288]

Believe us with a 1.2GHz proscessor you DON'T want to try software raid controlling. Save yourself a huge headache and just get a RAID 5 SCSI controller card. I'm not A+ certified but I am on my way to my Network+ certification and have been looking at the A+ stuff for information purposes.

RAID 5 is the best there is. But for this to happen you have to have a raid 5 controller and compatible drives. All drives need to be the same SCSI connection too. Whether it's double wide, fast scsi, etc, etc, The controller should come with software for setting up the drives and initializing them. I don't think you can have a server up and running and then add raid 5 to it. You'll have to get the raid setup then load the OS then do what you want from there. I just built a Notes server this week and it was a headache. It acutally created the raid while we were loading the OS..but it was a fresh build of the server..

[hondafox440]

So you're saying I need to buy a new RAID 5 card, then reformat all of the drives, then install them on the same cable and reinstall the OS? No other way to do it? Also, I have a 9.1GB boot/OS drive that will be seperate from the storage drive(s). The storage drive(s) are all 47GB Ultra (full size) SCSIs. 1 will be mounted in the same tower as the OS, the other 2 will be in another tower.

[Admin]

Your Current Adaptec card should work fine.

You shouldn't need to reformat your current drive either. I have setup several raids over the past couple of years, but I haven't done one this year.

I do know that all you need to do is install the other two drives on the same system cable and change their drive properies to Dynamic in Windows XP. Then you will need to select the three volumes that you want to convert to a Raid 5. Again, I haven't had to do one recently, but when setup they are great. about 6 months ago my main drive in my Novell server failed, so I just swapped it out with no problems.

Here is a tutorial on Windows 2000 which should be about the same for XP

Tutorial on Raid 5 (http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/14675/14675.html)

More Microsoft Info (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;hu;308424)

[remlapr]

His current SCSI card will work for doing software raid, but not hardware. I think you may understand that but he may not. Doing it that way all of the additional overhead of reading and writing across multiple drives will be put on his cpu. Either way he goes I do agree he shouldn't have to re-load his OS though because he's using a seperate physical drive as his boot drive.

My suggestion is to give what Harlen is saying a try first because you already have everything you need and see how bad the performance hit is. If it's unacceptable and you still want to do it then it's time to start looking at Raid controller cards.

[p@iNn3ck]

Just get a second scsi controller card to run ur data drives in raid... leave ur boot drive alone... if u use raid 5 with the 3 - 47 gb youll only have 94 GB of space.... if u just do stiping, ull increase read speed but loose the redundancy...

here ya go:
http://www.lsilogic.com/products/stor_prod/raid/backgrounder1.html

[hondafox440]

Thanks a ton Harlen. I found some more resources on this and it doesn't look to difficult. I just have to wait for the new tower and drives to come in. On a side note, is anyone looking for soem SCSI CD-ROM drives? The tower I bought comes with 7 of them, so I am ripping them all out and putting drives in there.

[Doibugu2]

Anybody smell that?


nerds!:eek:














J/P:blah: LMAO

[hondafox440]

Hmm. I just read the site that p@iNn3ck posted. What I want is drive spanning, but I don't want the features of RAID 10,30, or 50. Is there any way to just span the drives without mirroring or striping? I'm not sure if I full understand what a parity drive is. Is it like mirroring, in the sense that in a 3 disk array it takes bits and pieces from each of the 2 storage drives, so in case one crashes it can be partially reconstructed?

[balla250ex]

I got one question...

WHAT?!

[Jaybr]

HondaFox

What you want to do is create a spanned volume, this will give you 1 logical disk (D: ) using all 3 physical disk. Just a warning, this setup will give you no fault tolerance like RAID.

Use Disk Manager in Windows XP, check the help for instructions. I don't think you'll suffer much (if any) performance hit since your not doing any striping.