Turahk Master of Fear Posted May 14, 2010 Posted May 14, 2010 So we have all of our files (ALL of them) on a shared 250GB HDD belonging to a Gateway GT5220. We've recently maxed it out, so we need to buy something else to store our files on (lots of images of our product line, past and present). I figure we'll need 500GB MINIMUM, although up to 1TB would be nice. But since we have so much at stake (all of our data) I was thinking about getting two identical 500+ drives and doing a RAID1 for redundancy in case of drive failure. I opened up the Gateway and although the main drive is an IDE, it has four SATA jacks on the motherboard, but I can't tell which revision they are. I'm guessing they're 1.5Gb/s--can anyone confirm that? Second question: Could I set up RAID1 on the motherboard without a controller card? Note: I have PCI, PCI-E x16, and PCI-E x1 slots (1 each) open. Third question: If I can set up RAID1 using the motherboard, would 3.0Gb/s hard drives be compatible if the board is 1.5Gb/s? Thanks! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
El_Capitan Posted May 14, 2010 Posted May 14, 2010 (edited) So we have all of our files (ALL of them) on a shared 250GB HDD belonging to a Gateway GT5220. We've recently maxed it out, so we need to buy something else to store our files on (lots of images of our product line, past and present). I figure we'll need 500GB MINIMUM, although up to 1TB would be nice. But since we have so much at stake (all of our data) I was thinking about getting two identical 500+ drives and doing a RAID1 for redundancy in case of drive failure. I opened up the Gateway and although the main drive is an IDE, it has four SATA jacks on the motherboard, but I can't tell which revision they are. I'm guessing they're 1.5Gb/s--can anyone confirm that? Second question: Could I set up RAID1 on the motherboard without a controller card? Note: I have PCI, PCI-E x16, and PCI-E x1 slots (1 each) open. Third question: If I can set up RAID1 using the motherboard, would 3.0Gb/s hard drives be compatible if the board is 1.5Gb/s? Thanks! Google is your friend... http://support.gateway.com/s//PC/R/1009151/1009151nv.shtml http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/search.asp?st=pn¶m=1009151 1. Check your BIOS. It's more likely that it's 1.5GB/s ports. 2. Update your motherboard driver, most likely yes. 3. I'm guessing yes, though the performance of the SATA II drive will be limited. P.S. Redundancy isn't full-proof. You might also want to back-up your data. Edited May 14, 2010 by El_Capitan Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turahk Master of Fear Posted May 14, 2010 Posted May 14, 2010 Google is your friend... http://support.gateway.com/s//PC/R/1009151/1009151nv.shtml http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/search.asp?st=pn¶m=1009151 1. Check your BIOS. It's more likely that it's 1.5GB/s ports. 2. Update your motherboard driver, most likely yes. 3. I'm guessing yes, though the performance of the SATA II drive will be limited. P.S. Redundancy isn't full-proof. You might also want to back-up your data. Found that first page with the specs already (didn't answer my first question), but I missed the one with the driver updates. Thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 1- Probably 1.5Gb/s, but if you could look on the motherboard and find the model number, we can look further. 2- Probably not. You need a raid-capable chipset in order to do a proper hardware raid configuration, or a seperate raid controller card. However, you can probably find a way to do a software raid, although I'm not sure what OS you're using. I dont think Vista has it built in, but I know Windows 7 does. 3- They would be compatible, yes. Any performance loss wouldnt even be noticable, if there was any to begin with. 1.5Gb/s = 188 MB/s, which is closer to the SSD realm than the mechanical HDD realm. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
El_Capitan Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 2- Probably not. You need a raid-capable chipset in order to do a proper hardware raid configuration, or a seperate raid controller card. However, you can probably find a way to do a software raid, although I'm not sure what OS you're using. I dont think Vista has it built in, but I know Windows 7 does. 3- They would be compatible, yes. Any performance loss wouldnt even be noticable, if there was any to begin with. 1.5Gb/s = 188 MB/s, which is closer to the SSD realm than the mechanical HDD realm. The motherboard driver update I mentioned includes updates for RAID, so he should be good. Two 1TB Spinpoint F3's get up to 210BM/s sequential reads, but a difference of 22MB/s isn't much. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 Ah, then yea, he should be fine if he just RTM's And ya the Spinpoints are nice but most of the time cant get anywhere near 188MB/s limit (random reads, any kind of writes), so he would never notice that theres a bottleneck unless he started dropping in SSD's. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turahk Master of Fear Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 We're running XP Server, I believe... but if we update the firmware on the motherboard like El_Capitan said we should be cool. What does RTM mean? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 Read The Manual... usually its RTFM, but I thought that would be a little rude All the RAID stuff should be in there if you still have it or can find it online. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
El_Capitan Posted May 17, 2010 Posted May 17, 2010 Read The Manual... usually its RTFM, but I thought that would be a little rude All the RAID stuff should be in there if you still have it or can find it online. Most likely the manual's lost... but you can always read an online version of the manual. However, purchased systems manuals never document information about the motherboard. Your best luck is finding out by going into the BIOS, setting the RAID option, and when you're configuring your RAID array, note whether it's SATA I or SATA II. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turahk Master of Fear Posted May 19, 2010 Posted May 19, 2010 I've been looking at Newegg's deal on the 1TB Spinpoint F3 for $70... looks amazing. I'm thinking we'll just get one and have it run scheduled backups to another drive on the network, like our current one already does. lol @ RTFM... I know I've heard that before, but I didn't recognize it when you took the F out You could've said "run to mama" for all I knew! Oh, and I wouldn't notice any bottlenecks in the hard drive since it's used over our network... and we use some of the oldest crap (old to me, anyway--at least we don't have anything beige) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turahk Master of Fear Posted May 22, 2010 Posted May 22, 2010 Just received the 1TB Spinpoint F3 this morning--I put it in my workstation as a secondary drive, currently formatting. I chickened out of the raid... We'll just use scheduled backups or something. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted May 22, 2010 Posted May 22, 2010 You wimp What are you using to back up? Imaging software or just maintaining multiple copies of data files? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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