from a security standpiont and raid question

hi i was wondering i have 2x 36gb raptors in raid the wd3600adfd latest revision and im wanting to add another hdd to that raid but because its next to impossable to find that paticuler revision at a decent price still under warranty i was wondering if i add a 74gb raptor adfd to the raid as raid0 would i be compramising my security in any way by having 2x36gb raptors running alongside 1x 74gb raptor since some of trhe space on the 74gb raptor would be un-used and wasted? i think for me this is the cheapest rout i can gop to get more speed and keep my semi low latency by getting a cheap 74gb raptor off ebay (cant find a 36gb adfd raptor under warranty .

but this would cause un-used disk space could that un-used disk space be explioted somehow or easily

 

I don't know about your answer to your question, but I will share a thought with you regarding RAID 0. I used it for some years. Lately I have been using my imaging more and more, and in general messing around with stuff too much. I had 2 x 750gb drives in RAID 0, so I had 1.5tb. I partitioned that off so that c: was like 1TB and d: was 500gb. I put some games and movies on that D: partition, and a few times I had some corruption where I had to break the raid array apart. For me, it is no big deal as I only used that partition as a storage area for things I wanted to load fast.

But, and here is where I am going with this, I decided to do some tests to see just how much faster my raid array was than two single drives. I ran some of the hdd test tools, and did some copy/pasting, cut/pasting, scripted file moves, etc etc. What I found was that while RAID 0 is faster in the benchmarks, under normal use I find no real 'noticable' increase except in OS load and large reads like when loading a large map or something in a game. No doubt photoshop or some other very large program could utilize the extra speed of RAID 0, but I just cannot tell any speed with the 'naked eye'.

So what I am suggesting, is that perhaps you should see if you can use your 'new' raptor, still blazing fast even as a single drive, can make you happy as a stand-alone. Your data certainly is safer there, as we all know. I only mention this because it would alleviate your concerns, but more, being a RAID fan, I am not conviced for software raid controllers that they are really giving much in way of performance that you can feel. Maybe you could test it out yourself and find if you too have a hard time noticing RAID vs. non-RAID speeds.

Just some thoughts I have been mulling over lately.

Sul.

 

for my usage booting re-doing the pc lol and some games and multi tasking the 2 10k rpm drives do help in performance i know by adding a third drive i wont see as big an increse as i did with the 1 but my read acces time with 2 drives is 8.2ms i believe thats full stroke or wichever HDTune shows. since they are the newest revision that helps a good deal in my setup. and SSD's are way to expensive for me so iv been looking for a cheap solution to add hopefully another 50mb's. i heard it can be done with another 74gb raptor its just some of the 74gb raptors space would be wasted and question is does that extra space cause a hole in security since it would be unviewable by the OS. now as far as weather i see a noticable difference with the eye in speed i know with 2 i do.
i dont have a third but am thinking about getting a 3rd assuming i can find the latest revision of a 74ADFD wich i believe is more common with the highgigabyte drive. just dont know what is to become of that extra space if it is easily exploitable bing on the internet and so forth

 

Perhaps others can answer better, but in my experience, unformatted disk space is not usable. So unless some nasty thing formatted it, I would not see an issue. Not any that I have ever seen or heard of anyway.

Perhaps you could go with software raid 5, thus having both redundancy of raid 1 as well as stripe speed of raid 0.

Sul.

 

ok you are probably right. as far as i can tell the raid is set up before boot on the raid controller the rest is left alone unless accesed by matrix raid at wich piont id imagine it would fail. but im looking into it more i read an alswome article about using matrix raid to have both raid 1 and raid0 on 2 hard drives. basicly what it does is it takes the fastest part of the hard drives and uses it for the raid0 and system critical files the slower part for raid1 very intersting it is on intels website but i dont quit understand it much yet. but im not sure this is new new think its been around iv just been behind the times.