Help needed to alter partitions

[Stoic Joker]

Correct, however the only thing it is "required" for is the conversion to Dynamic Disk, which is fairly pointless on a workstation/desktop.

-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2010, 06:41 AM)

Unless you're going to run software raid-striping

-f0dder (October 11, 2010, 09:07 AM)

You gotta want it real bad to go that route - Maybe 2% of folks could justify the trade-off. Not to mention it can't be done on the system/boot partition.

-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2010, 11:23 AM)

Which trade-off?

-f0dder (October 11, 2010, 11:27 AM)

Gotta have 3 hard drives. to gain anything that way.

Back in the Win2k days when DD was new and everything was IDE 3 HDDs and an optical drive meant sombody was getting downshifted to PIO mode (ok or slightly better UDMA33). Sure there were some SCSI workstations (Zoiks!), but you did mention cost as a factor...

So if you were already gonna need another IDE controller card, you might as well get one with RAID - I did back then and still have the card in an old server.

Sure now the SATA Mboards have 4/6/8 channels for hard drives...but they also come with onboard RAID. So no real purpose for DD there either. Remember the piont the discussion started on is what is the 8MB stub left on an NTFS drive for. It's done automatically (only) by Windows setup (3rd party programs never do that) to allow for the conversion to Dynamic Disk. Typically for the purpose of setting up a software mirror of the system/boot partition(s)

Cluster size with DD is a penalty of its own as a 2kb text file will become 6kb after the conversion. For those of us with lots of small text files (a.k.a. source code snippets) that sucks.


@ Carol - Me too back when, I just didn't do it the Windows native Dynamic Disk route (had a Paradise card as f0dder mentioned). Now I use the RAID5 option that's built into the Asus Commando Mboard I'm running.

[Carol Haynes]

I used to use onboard Promise Raid interface. To be honest I found it more hassle than it was worth (though it rarely caused any problems requiring a reinstall). It did help with video editing before multiple processors were available but now it doesn't seem worth the effort for a desktop.

[Stoic Joker]

Onboard Promise RAID before multiple processors were available? (I believe you, but...) Help me out on the time line...when was that?

I was running a Tyan Tiger S18something in 2000-ish with dual P3-600s but it didn't have RAID - That's why I got the Promise card so I could play with the misc DD configurations back then. I've still got 3 of the rigs I built around the Tyan Mboard, one of wich is still running 24/7 with Server 2k3.

[Carol Haynes]

It was up until about 3 years ago - I had an AMD Athlon A MSI motherboard (if memory serves) which had Promise 0 and 1 onboard. It worked fine and gave a little speed boost for large data shifting applications (such as video editing) but I can't really see the point now with faster SATA drives and multi-core processors.

[f0dder]

Promise (and others) have had onboard for ages. I had it on my non-dualcore P4... MSI chipset, when maxxed out it would give slight data corruption. Lovely story.

Anyway, for RAID5, CPUs are so fast today that you need real high-end cards in order to not get a speed hit. For other modes, the CPU hit has always been negligible, and as I wrote earlier: you need battery-backed cache to get a real advantage. For normal use, the only thing """hardware""" raid buys you is the ability to boot from it

[kyrathaba]

Thanks for your insight, guys.