Need a Raid Controller driver for Vista?
I think your problem is that you need to create the disk for the Raid Controller so that when installing Windows you press the F6 option and install the driver that Windows needs to be able to access the drive (if I understand your previous question correctly). The driver for this will be on the manufacturers website for the motherboard (or the brand name of your PC or Laptop under the model number). You will also need a Floppy Disc and a Disc Drive if not available in your machine already. For a Laptop this may mean a USB one (not cheap for a one off use) and it needs to be able to boot from a USB device (many older ones cant). There is often a section in the drivers list for creating the RAID controller disc and this is where you must look, if using a USB FDD then you don't need to boot from it but it must be connected when you first boot the machine or it will not recognise the drive when Windows install wants to read from it.
Would the onboard RAID controller on the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 be okay for RAID 5?
I've upgraded a lot of components in my computer somewhat recently, including the motherboard, but I've been worrying more and more that my system drive has been the same one I've been using for years, and I'm just asking for trouble with this. It's a Western Digital drive, and I've usually had pretty good experiences with them, but still, I've been thinking about buying two more of the same one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073 is the drive I am currently using for my system drive) and setting them up in a RAID 5. I've done some research on this, though, and many places have said that performance can be bad if your onboard controller is not good, so I'm wondering if I will have to buy a dedicated one if I am to do so. The motherboard I am using is this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128362 Does anyone know if that motherboard would be okay doing RAID 5 with the onboard controller? I know that it supports it, but will the performance be good?
Servers: What happens if i remove 1 drive of a raid 1, is the 2nd drive still accessible or not?
RAID 1 is simply a mirror of the data across two or more drives - so long as there isn't also a fault with the second drive, if you remove (or mark as dead) the first drive, the second will carry on as normal. In the case of proper hardware-based RAID cards, the underlying OS wouldn't even know the drive has been removed. It's presented with a single 'drive' with the RAID card processing the requests to the correct drive itself.All that happens is that the RAID code simple redirects any requests that would have been sent to the first drive to the second one instead. This will result in loss of read performance (less drives to read from concurrently) but shouldn't affect write performance that much (it would still have to write to all the drives regardless).
Should I use an SSD RAID as a cache for my 2 TB Drive?
In theory can, but in fact that will degrade your computing experience.Your configuration will create something like fusion drive by Seagate where small solid state cache the huge drive. But since you'll be RAIDing the SSD as cache, there will be more problem to than its worth.Backups will be a nightmare, as hardware raid isn't that reliable. When hardware raid controller died, you'll need exact same controller to read it again, if you were lucky then you can read.So the answer would be 60GB + 2TB hard disk.However I would still not recommend that configuration too, as they are a little too fragile, especially when you're dealing with important data.Also it might cause cache hit and miss scenario where that will add more burden to the CPU and latency to the system.If you need a fast boot time then just boot from the SSD RAID and keep the data in the 2TB HDD.
Why is a RAID 5 CONSIDERED BETTER THAN A MIRROR?
i dunno .. i love my mirror ... maybe coz it has data redundancy and u dont lose harddrive space either .. a mirror is only as large as a single drive in the array ...
Why isn't there a read performance increase with raid 1?
The primary performance improvement from RAID1 comes from reading different sectors of data from both sides of the mirrored pair of drives concurrently. Practically this only happens with any regularity on multi-user and multi-processing systems, so if you are evaluating RAID1 for performance improvement on a single user system you will be disappointed. The performance boost that Thomas Rush mentions, reading from the drive whose head is currently positioned to minimize latency is another less significant performance improvement that can be seen on a single user system. However, as noted, only an advanced RAID controller will support this feature and software RAID does not have access to the hardware data needed to implement it.
What is the reason behind not being able to see any disk partitions while installing Ubuntu 12.04 on a laptop with two hard disks (SATA + SSD), both of which are in RAID0 configuration?
The "change RAID to ACHI" is only a solution, as you discovered, in a situation where you aren't trying to maintain the existing Windows installation.If the installer is not detecting any drives at all, it is because the installer doesn't have a driver for the RAID controller you've got in the system. Not knowing exactly which one you've got, I'm not able to suggest which driver (or possibly, newer version of Ubuntu) you'll need to get that fixed. Unfortunately, because Windows was installed on a RAID0, the odds of you having destroyed the Windows install while performing your Ubuntu install in AHCI mode are very high. In answer to your questions:1) Note that you're going to have to probably perform a factory drive refresh to put Windows back onto the system before you do this, if you want your Lenovo-version of Windows on the system as well. Once you've got a driver that works, you should be able to resize the Windows partition and create space on the RAID for your Ubuntu installation to land safely in a multi-boot configuration. Install Ubuntu to this newly-freed space, and set it to be the default boot option in the boot loader (which should automatically detect and create a boot option for Windows).2) AHCI is the "Advanced Host Controller Interface" specification, which is a SATA (Serial ATA, which replaced Parallel ATA, or PATA, also known as IDE for drive connections) specification for attaching storage devices to a system. It allows for single drives to be connected individually to a system, and addressed individually. RAID0 is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Drives/Disks/Devices), level 0. It allows you to join multiple disks together to be treated by the operating system (e.g., Windows or Ubuntu) as a single, larger drive that has better performance than an individual drive (other RAID levels also provide data redundancy to help mitigate data loss in the case of drive failure, but that is outside the scope of your question, so I'll just leave the link here: Standard RAID levels), because data can be written to both drives at once, theoretically doubling the read and write performance. The problem is caused because it's two distinct methods of accessing the hard drives, which cannot co-exist.3) Installation on an SSD is almost always going to result in faster performance. I covered in my preface and question 1 answer how to go about installing it without destroying your Windows install.