teach you to improve your hard drive performance

Today we are going to improve hard disk performance with soft raid.

A simple understanding of soft raid

Soft raid does not require a RAID control card, which is controlled by the software. Windows 2000/XP supports this feature. Let me first introduce you to the basics of soft raid.

In Windows2000/xp, a physical hard disk is divided into two types, one is a basic disk and one is a dynamic disk. A basic disk is a physical hard disk that contains primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives that can be accessed by other operators, and dynamic disks can be upgraded through Disk Management in Windows 2000/XP, containing only dynamic volumes created by Disk Management and managed by the Disk Management program, Therefore, it cannot be accessed by other operating systems.

Soft raid is called a volume by Windows 2000/XP. To use software RAID on Windows 2000, you must upgrade a basic disk to a dynamic disk to create the striped volume (RAID0) that we need on a dynamic disk. There are several formats for the volume, and the following are the types of software RAID 0 that we build.

1. Simple volume: a volume that forms a single physical disk space. It can consist of a single area on a disk or multiple zones connected together on the same disk, and can extend a simple volume within the same disk. A simple volume that installs the operating system becomes a boot volume.

2. Spanned volumes: A simple volume can also be extended to other physical disks, so that a volume of space consisting of multiple physical disks is called a spanned volume. Both simple and spanned volumes are not part of the raid category.

3. Striped Volume: A volume that stores data in a striped form on two or more physical disks. The data on the striped volume is allocated alternately, evenly (in striped form) to these disks, which are the best performing in all the volumes available to Windows 2000/xp, but do not provide fault tolerance. If any of the disk data on the striped volume is corrupted or a disk fails, the data on the entire volume is lost. Striped volumes can be viewed as RAID0 in hardware RAID.

Ii. Establishment of striped volumes (RAID0)

With the knowledge, let's look at how to build a high-performance striped volume. Here is a Windows 2000 example for you to introduce. A striped volume must be reformatted to the hard disk and the data will be lost, so it is recommended that you back up all partitions outside of Windows 2000, after backing up your hard disk data.

Then log on to Windows 2000 as a system administrator, and then turn on my computer → control Panel → admin tools → computer Management → storage → disk Management (local) (Figure 1). The upper part of the screen shows the details of the partition or volume, the lower half shows the state of the physical disk, and the two types of physical disks are shown on the left side of this section. The disks 0 and 1 in the figure are physical disks and are now basic disks that we want to upgrade to a dynamic disk and create a striped volume.

The next thing is to upgrade to a dynamic disk. On disk 0 or disk 1, click the right mouse button, select "Upgrade to Dynamic Disk (U)" and after the dialog box, check out the disk 0 and Disk 1 and make sure that the upgrade is finished in a few seconds, at which point Disk 0 and Disk 1 have become dynamic disks, and Windows 2000 the partition becomes a simple volume that contains bootstrap information, which is the boot volume. The rest of the space becomes unassigned.

Then create the striped volume. Unassigned space can create a simple volume or striped volume, right-click on disk 0 Unassigned space and select "Create Volume", select "Striped Volume" after clicking "Next", add Disk 0 and Disk 1 to the right "selected dynamic disk (S)" column, and press the next step, Windows prompts you to assign a drive letter (which can be assigned by Windows or manually, generally by default), Then you need to format it. You can select FAT32 and NTFS as the file system for the striped volume, and then select the size and volume label of the cluster, the larger the cluster the higher the disk performance but the greater the space waste. I chose "Default", which is automatically set by Windows, tick on "Perform quick format" and make sure that after a few seconds of formatting, a drive letter "D" appears in the upper half of the screen, which is a striped volume with a disk 0 original unassigned capacity of twice times, which is the RAID0 array we want.

When using hardware-level RAID0, if two physical hard disks are not equal in capacity, the total capacity of the RAID0 array created is twice times smaller, such as a 10GB and a 20GB hard drive to create a hardware-level RAID0, the total capacity is 10GX2=20GB, The extra 10G space on the larger hard drive is not available and is wasted. With Windows 2000 software RAID, although you can only create a striped volume of up to twice times the size of a smaller hard disk, the extra space on a larger hard drive can be leveraged. The way to do this is to create a simple volume with the remaining space on the larger hard disk, and the simple volume will be assigned a different drive letter, using the same as the logical drive on the basic disk. The steps to create a simple volume are roughly the same as creating a striped volume, except that you select the volume type by selecting simple volume. A dynamic disk allows multiple types of volumes to coexist, and after creating a striped volume, disk 1 also has 1.1GB of unassigned space, and we use it to create a simple volume with drive letter E. At this point, disks 0 and 1 both have striped volumes and simple volumes, and all space is used without any waste.
Precautions:

1. After creating a volume, to change the volume type, you must first delete the volume, and all data will be lost when you delete the volume, so you need to back up the data first. The removal method is simple, right click on the volume, select Delete Volume (D), and then follow the prompts.

2. Creating a volume must use an unassigned space on a dynamic disk. Two dynamic disks can create multiple striped volumes, and you can create striped volumes with multiple disks at the same time, with each striped volume set at will (of course within the capacity of the disk), which is unmatched by hardware RAID.

3. To restore a dynamic disk to a basic disk, you must first delete all volumes on the dynamic disk, then right-click on the disk, select Restore to Basic disk, and then follow the prompts. If you want to uninstall Windows 2000/XP and install other operating systems, remember to back up the data before restoring the dynamic disk to the basic disk, otherwise the dynamic disk will not be recognized by other operating systems and the disk cannot be used. If this is the case, you can identify it by hanging the hard drive to a machine that has Windows 2000/XP installed.

Third, performance test

The performance of soft raid is comparable to that of hard raid, and it is ideal for two hard drives with large differences in size but speed. See here you have the heart of it, quick hands-on experience!