Rebuild strategy

[xMTone]

Hi,

After hard drive failure, I have got two new Raptor HDs and a 2-ch RAID capable SATA controller. I have a few questions:

[1] My original plan was to have one disk house OS/applications, and the other as more of a data warehouse. I thought this would improve performance, i.e. if an app needs to read something off disk while it's running, it would have a separate HD channel to record audio, for example. But what about this RAID striping thing? Would that be even better performance? Is there any way to meaningfully back up such a setup (because that is a must for this situation)? I have an external HD with Restrospect software, would that cut it?

[2] I bought some 2-fan low profile HD coolers, but they won't fit in my case. How concerned should I be about this considering 10K drive speeds? If it really made sense, I would convert over to a case with built in cooling.

[3] I'm starting over, but had XP installed on one of the drives and was trying to get it configured... I was having problems with the OS not recognizing "new" PCI card (new hardware wizard), which was actually installed during OS install. I tried shut down->remove card->start up->shut down->install card->start up, but this didn't work either (in fact it froze during boot whenever the hardware was removed or installed). If I remove everything non-essential before my rebuild then shut down and install it, should this take care of the problem?

I've been without a computer for 2 weeks, and now have all the parts I need, so any prompt advice would be veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery much appreciated!

 

[Addis]

1. Your first scenario is not using RAID, but more of the usual OS/Data drive configurations. Depending on how you use your computer you may get a bit better performance if the drive is bottlenecked. The second method you describe is RAID 0, or striping. In RAID striping the OS splits a file into pieces and writes them on 2 different drives, effectively increasing read/write speeds. However there is one major drawback to RAID 0; if for any reason one drive fails, all your data is lost since they will be striped. For data redundancy, I recommend you configure you're drive as RAID 1; in this setup you will only get 1 drive capacity but when you write a file, the file is written to both discs at the same time. So if one fails you have another drive that is still intact.

2. Hard drive coolers are recommended for 10k rpm drives, as they generate a lot of heat. Especially with the 2 high performance drives you'll be using.

3. You're question isn't really clear. For every new build we always recommend a fresh install with all motherboard/chipset/graphics drivers as soon as its done.

 

[xMTone]

Thank you. To clarify the 3rd question, I mean peripheral PCI cards, case in point: a Roland RPC-1 card (which is an interface to a hardware control surface for audio recording applications).

The card was left installed while rebuilding. There was no blurb about new hardware immediately after the first startup, and the "Add New Hardware Wizard" did not recognize it either.

Should peripherals like this be removed for initial OS install and installed after a later shutdown to prompt their recognition?

There was something in the install instructions for that particular card that said you had to be logged on as "Administrator"... I could not figure out how to log in with that account, although my actual user account seemed to have administrative privileges.

I was surprised not to see "Found new hardware" bubbles even for the USB/Firewire cards that were left in the machine, which don't even require drivers.