Implementing
RAID 0 on Windows Server
2003
Windows
Server 2003 supports
disk mirroring
(RAID 1),
disk striping
(RAID 0),
and
disk striping
with parity (RAID
5). Implementing
these RAID techniques
is discussed in the
sections that follow.
Caution
Some operating systems,
such as MS-DOS,
don't support
RAID. If you
dual boot your system
to one of these
noncompliant operating
systems, your
RAID - configured
drives will be unusable.
Implementing RAID 0
RAID
level 0, or RAID
0 is the same that disk striping.
With disk striping
(RAID 0),
two or more volumes
- each on a separate
drive - are configured
as a
striped set, the operating system will act like it has only one drive. Data
written to the
striped
set is broken into blocks
that are called
stripes. These
stripes are written
sequentially to all
drives in the
striped set. You
can place volumes for
a striped set on up
to 32 drives, but in
most circumstances sets
with two to five volumes
offer the best performance
improvements. Beyond
this, the performance
improvement decreases
significantly.
The
major advantage of
disk striping
is speed. Data can be
accessed on multiple
disks using multiple
drive heads, which improves
performance considerably.
However, this performance
boost comes with a price
tag. As with
volume sets, if
any hard disk drive
in the
striped set fails,
the
striped set can
no longer be used, which
means that essentially
all data in the
striped set is lost.
You'll need to recreate
the striped set and
restore the data from
backups.
Caution
The boot and system
volumes shouldn't
be part of a
striped set.
Don't use disk
striping with
these volumes.
Disk stripingWhen you create striped sets,
you'll want to use volumes
that are approximately
the same size. Disk
Management bases the
overall size of the
striped set on the
smallest volume size.
Specifically, the maximum
size of the
striped set is a
multiple of the smallest
volume size. For example,
if the smallest volume
is 50 MB, the maximum
size for the striped
site is 150 MB.
To
maximize performance
of the
striped set, you
can do several things:
-
Use disks that are
on separate disk
controllers. This
allows the system
to simultaneously
access the drives.
-
Don't use the disks
containing the
striped set
for other purposes.
This allows the
disk to dedicate
its time to the
striped set.
You
can create a
striped set by doing
the following:
-
In the Disk Management
Graphical View,
right-click an area
marked Unallocated
on a dynamic
disk and then
choose New Volume.
This starts the
New Volume Wizard.
Read the welcome
page, and then click
Next.
-
Select Striped as
the volume type
and create the volume.
The key difference
is that you need
at least two dynamic
disks to create
a striped
volume.
-
Once you create
a striped
volume,
you can use the
volume just like
any other volume.
You can't expand
a
striped set
once it's created.
Because of this,
you should carefully
consider the setup
before you implementing
RAID 0.
Disk striping
is know ready. You
have RAID 0
up and running!
This section:
Implementing disk striping on windows 2003 |
