Pay attention to your hard disk!!

[Orignall Posted April 16 2006]


When we buy computers, we make sure to get fast CPU, adequate memory and enough storage capacity hard disk. Expect that there is hardly any attention paid to hard disk performance. Most computers today ship with an 80GB~300GB SATA hard disk and but there are some time machines out there still utilizing PATA hard drives.

Hard drives are undoubtedly the most vital and slowest component in today's PC especially SATA and PATA storage devices. Every software and file on your pc is stored on a hard drive and run from there. So if a hard drive is slow, the whole system is presented with a performance bottleneck regardless how ubberfast the memory and CPU is. But stuffing a home PC with a SCSI RAID wouldn’t be a sensible solution or a economical one.

However, SATA based storage devices can provide a reasonable solution if there are is a SATA RAID controller and few ports available. Almost all midrange motherboard from major manufacturer’s today feature onboard RAID controllers and handful of SATA ports.

First, there should be two identical drives of equal capacity utilizing SATA interface. There is no need for mega capacity disks since you shouldn’t be installing anything beside OS on a RAID array partition, anything equal or more than 20GB is perfect. Setup these hard disk in RAID0 array through your RAID controller BIOS. Once the RAID array and its partitions are initialized, you can go ahead and install your favorite OS on it.

Beware of the following that:-
Setting up existing hard disk in RAID array will wipe any data on them.
RAID0 is not redundant and loss of one disk will result in entire data loss, therefore do not store your important files on a RAID0 partition. Use it only for OS and stuff. Take regular backup. RAID0 is intended for increasing performance only.
TIPS:
Avoid improper shutdowns and power resets of your PC, this increases the corruption chances of data stored on a RAID array.
You may take a ghost backup of your OS partition on RAID array for future restore if needed.
Do not make any logical partitions on your RAID array.
Use SATA2 complaint controller and compatible hard disk. SATA2 offers double bandwidth compared to SATA1 - 3Gbit/s vs. 1.5gbit/s
You should have a second hard disk of what ever capacity you like to store all your important data, preferences and NT profiles. This way, if your RAID gets corrupted your important data is still safe and tucked away.

Using SATA RAID0, it is possible to achieve performance gains anywhere between 80%-150% depends on your hard ware grade and quality.
RAID1 (mirroring) can also be used to improve performance where operations or mostly read only but it is at the expense of degrading write performance. However added benefit of RAID1 is redundancy.

Matrix RAID available on Intel ICH6R RAID BIOS is an even better option since it employes a part of disk for RAID0 and part of disk for RAID1 providing redundancy and stripping in a single RAID array. End user can use the stripped partition for OS and mirrored partition for data.

And finally, RAID stuff is intended only for pros. If you are a N00bie, RTFM.