Windows Dynamic Disks

[wodger]

I've got GBPVR installed on a 160GB drive and this is also my recordings drive. I've got extra drives as listed below and I am thinking about setting it up like this:

40GB
- Windows/system/GBPVR volume

and

160GB + 160GB + 250GB = 570GB
- One single spanned recordings volume using Windows dynamic disks.

The downside I know about is that if a disk dies I'll lose my recordings. I can live with this. Anything that's important I back up elsewhere.

Are there any problems with this from GBPVR's perspective?

Cheers
Julian.

[whurlston]

Are there any problems with this from GBPVR's perspective?

Nope, it will just be a 570GB drive to GBPVR.

[elite]

I can confirm no issues with this and have been running without issues for over a year now.

[wodger]

Cool. Anyone seen any issues with performance? I just wondered if the spanning made the system slower for dealing with large files like the 2-7GB ts files I get. Especially thinking about multirecording 2-3 channels and playing something at the same time, which I do now with no problems.

Cheers

[Reddwarf]

I changed from single IDE-disk to SATA-RAID in stripe raid. In theory that gives you twice the speed to/from the harddrive, and even if that is not entierly true I can see greatly improved I/O speed. For instance: running Comskip used to choke my system completely but now I can even record while Comskip is running.

I recommend using stripe RAID array for best performance (of cource this also nearly doubles the capacity, 160Gb + 160Gb = about 310 Gb due to some overhead).

[wodger]

I recommend using stripe RAID array

Not sure if this is an option with my Dell box?

[whurlston]

Not sure if this is an option with my Dell box?

If the hardware doesn't, Windows Dynamic disks support software RAID 0 (striping). Just tell it you want a striped disk instead of a spanned disk.

[Reddwarf]

Another option, if you have a free PCI slot, is to buy a raid-controller and connect your drives to.. I'v tested that too and it works .

[forzaKGB]

BUT to make it work faster than software RAID make sure the RAID-card has its own processor and do not buy a card that cost $100 or less (or rely on the on-motherboard RAID). They are only software RAID and do not help in any way reagarding performance.

Of course it works, you get your Concatenated or striped volume. But not the performance gain.

[Reddwarf]

That is true, if you buy a cheap card without it's own processor you will only charge more load on the cpu without getting better performance.