RAID for a Boot Disk
posted in Technology, Vista, Software |I had this “bright” idea to use RAID1 for my boot disk on my new workstation. In theory its all handled by the Intel chipset, should be high performance. As RAID1 writes aren’t any faster, but reads should be twice as fast, so running Windows, my page file, and other key stuff on there should help give me great performance. Plus I figured my time is very valuable, and not having to worry about rebuilding my whole machine if I have a drive failure sounds like a great idea, right?
It was a TERRIBLE IDEA. It was terrible. A complete mistake.
The catch is that for your boot drive, RAID1 makes it way less reliable. Partly because its controlled by all these BIOS settings, and I’ve had times when it reset and then the machine started up with the drives not in RAID mode. Which was fine until I tried to put it back into RAID mode. Then it wouldn’t boot and I couldn’t get the Windows repair utilities to touch it. Faced with the possibility of having to reinstall Windows I switched RAID mode off and now I just have a normal system disk.
The other thing I didn’t realize is that as a RAID disk, if anything happens to the system like a crash or whatnot, it is going to have to rebuild it. Of course rebuilding the disk when you are trying to boot from it is a bad thing, and as far as I can tell the controller can’t really do a rebuild until the system is done rebooting.
Plus it needs special drivers that aren’t built into Vista (or most other operating systems) so anytime you are trying to install/do system maintenance you are back to installing these extra drivers, which is just a mess.
So the RAID is gone. I’ll probably just use the 2nd disk for my page file and maybe move my VM data over there…