Raid-1 configuration in DOS?

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 1:47 pm

Because of the backup situation with DOS and the DMA server, I have been considering trying out a raid-1 configuration in DOS. I understand that many raid motherboards and pci cards may not have DOS drivers, but some apparently do.

Anyone ever try raid-1 mirrors in a DOS system?

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 6:15 pm

After doing a bit of research, it appears as though there are three types of raid-1 configurations. One is software raid, which the cpu and operating system would do in windows (and *nix too maybe?) - the second is hardware versions, and the third is driverless, where everything is mirrored/copied on the fly, and the operating system doesn't even know it's there. The third option sounds like it would be the obvious choice in dos..

any input?

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 10:10 am

Malakai wrote:After doing a bit of research, it appears as though there are three types of raid-1 configurations. One is software raid, which the cpu and operating system would do in windows (and *nix too maybe?) - the second is hardware versions, and the third is driverless, where everything is mirrored/copied on the fly, and the operating system doesn't even know it's there. The third option sounds like it would be the obvious choice in dos..

any input?

You would be best to use hardware config, raid 5 (requires 3 identical drives)
I run the wg2 dos bbs (win95 dos nogui boot) with 3 36.4 gig scsi drives.
That computer runs a HP 3si disk array controller (part# D5955a) easy to config its nram for the raid level configuration and drivers are available for dos thru win 2k3 and a multi OS driver also. The main bbs and dev server run similar hardware configs all raid 5.

The hp scsi controller cards are nice, cache battery backup, 64 meg cache or more and you can find them on ebay for about 20 bucks and should work in any standard pci slot. Adaptec is another good mfg with drivers available for most OS's.

A bit of info about software raid in windoz
http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Be sure you have a complete backup before begining raid level changes or initializeing a raid stack.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 2:35 pm

That sounds like a great idea.. I actually have 3 almost identical quantum atlas III drives, but I believe one of them may not be any good. I know my SCSI cable isn't any good, because I can't get either of my 4 scsi drives to work on either of my scsi controllers. Unfortunately, none of the controllers are raid compatible. Well, actually, one is compatible with a zero channel raid card..

I'm trying to save up a little bit of money to upgrade the main dual xeon server and add raid to all of the servers, as well as adding cat6 gigabit wired ethernet to all of the systems. Of course, the BBS doesn't need gigabit, but this is a shared internet, not dedicated to just the BBS, and I'm messing with media servers, clients, expanders, and wireless chokes them up very badly. It'd be great just to have one large media server with my whole collection of dvds, laserdiscs, vcds, vhs, etc all at the touch of a button, anywhere on the network. Different people in different rooms will be able to watch different things all from the media server at the same time. This will also help out for when/if I start working on my indoor theater project.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sun Jun 14, 2009 9:24 am

Malakai wrote:That sounds like a great idea.. I actually have 3 almost identical quantum atlas III drives, but I believe one of them may not be any good. I know my SCSI cable isn't any good, because I can't get either of my 4 scsi drives to work on either of my scsi controllers. Unfortunately, none of the controllers are raid compatible. Well, actually, one is compatible with a zero channel raid card..

I'm trying to save up a little bit of money to upgrade the main dual xeon server and add raid to all of the servers, as well as adding cat6 gigabit wired ethernet to all of the systems. Of course, the BBS doesn't need gigabit, but this is a shared internet, not dedicated to just the BBS, and I'm messing with media servers, clients, expanders, and wireless chokes them up very badly. It'd be great just to have one large media server with my whole collection of dvds, laserdiscs, vcds, vhs, etc all at the touch of a button, anywhere on the network. Different people in different rooms will be able to watch different things all from the media server at the same time. This will also help out for when/if I start working on my indoor theater project.

Lots of deals on ebay for raid cards. The performance increase willl certainly help the bbs and the theater project.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Mon Jun 15, 2009 12:02 am

I just bought a scsi cable off of ebay to test out the scsi drives I have, just to make sure they haven't gone bad.

Luckily, I found out how to completely skip one of the raid-1 or raid-5 configuration on my door game server, by using a mapped network drive from the main server's hard drives. I'm about 99.9% sure this will work, and the way that it'll work is that the door game server will run on only one hard drive, with win2k, but all of the doors and score server will be run from the main server's hard drives. I'll have to do a bunch of bat file and directory configurations/changes, to make sure everything points to the right drive. It should save me $100 more or less and still get the job done.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Mon Jun 15, 2009 2:49 pm

Well, I ended up getting my cable to work by reversing it. Of course, this won't work very well on a server, because most of the connections would be too close to the motherboard and wouldn't reach where the hard drives are, but it at least gave me a chance to see which hard drives still work and not. One is definitely dead, has a fault light lit up and isn't showing up on the scsi setup screen. The others, I'm scanning. This means, at minimum, I'll have to buy at least one more scsi drive to do a raid 5 though.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Mon Jun 15, 2009 11:10 pm

unfortunately, 2 out of the three matched hard drives were bad... so it pretty much means I'd have to basically start from scratch..

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 9:34 am

Malakai wrote:unfortunately, 2 out of the three matched hard drives were bad... so it pretty much means I'd have to basically start from scratch..

Never fails think one is bad and turns out to be 2. Ive been haveing fairly good luck with ebay. HP U-320 15k rpm 36 gig scsi for 10-30 bucks. Kiss the pauses in major mud and other wait to write pauses goodbye.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:34 pm

What are you using to cool those 15k drives? My seagate cheetah (also 15k) gets hot enough to fry an egg on in about 15 minutes.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:31 pm

When I setup raid, I'm going to assume that I need a boot disk with the raid drivers, whether it be a floppy, cd-rom, or another hard drive, correct?

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:56 pm

Just ordered two of those HP 3si cards

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 11:05 am

Malakai wrote:What are you using to cool those 15k drives? My seagate cheetah (also 15k) gets hot enough to fry an egg on in about 15 minutes.

Yes mine are also good to fry eggs on also, I installed an extra fan to help cool them down.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 11:09 am

Malakai wrote:When I setup raid, I'm going to assume that I need a boot disk with the raid drivers, whether it be a floppy, cd-rom, or another hard drive, correct?

Yup, run the floppy drive and cd thru normal method, add the scsi card and drives. The scsi card will have its own utils set to get the drive partions and initial format done. The you can install the os.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 11:11 am

Malakai wrote:Just ordered two of those HP 3si cards

You can grab the drivers here, also some good docs.

Â» Microsoft MS-DOS
Â» Microsoft Windows 2000
Â» Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Â» Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Â» Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
Â» Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Â» Novell NetWare 4.x
Â» Novell NetWare 5.x
Â» Novell NetWare 6.x
Â» OS/2 Warp
Â» SCO UNIX
Â» UnixWare

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... g=en&cc=us

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 3:01 pm

Great.. thanks for all of the help. It'll probably still be awhile before everything is bought up and put together.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Mon Jun 29, 2009 8:39 pm

Well, my two raid cards came in this evening, and although I don't have any matched hard drives with me currently (there are some on the way), I did try one of the cards out, just to see if I could get wgdos to work on one of the computers it wouldn't boot up with before on the old adaptec cards. It worked! And man the loading speed of just one hard drive is a lot faster than the other ones!

Majormud did a database recovery in probably about 20 seconds on one of the test servers. It could take several minutes to do one on a normal setup. The 16mb of cache (edo ram, upgradeable I think) must work some miracles there.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Tue Jun 30, 2009 9:35 am

Malakai wrote:Well, my two raid cards came in this evening, and although I don't have any matched hard drives with me currently (there are some on the way), I did try one of the cards out, just to see if I could get wgdos to work on one of the computers it wouldn't boot up with before on the old adaptec cards. It worked! And man the loading speed of just one hard drive is a lot faster than the other ones!

Majormud did a database recovery in probably about 20 seconds on one of the test servers. It could take several minutes to do one on a normal setup. The 16mb of cache (edo ram, upgradeable I think) must work some miracles there.

Wooo Hooo! I am glad to hear you got the same results as I did with Majormud and load times, you'll find it and everything plays/runs alot better now.

You can just add drives in on same stack or if you get 3 identical drives and another 68 pin cable build a new stack on one of the other 2 channels and just migrate the data to the new stack.

You can upgrade to 64 meg but the ram is hard to find and is fairly expensive

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Tue Jun 30, 2009 11:22 am

Yeah, I've seen a few cards with a 16mb chip in them cheaper than the 64mb chip itself. Would adding 64mb even improve speed any more in a dos wg environment?

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Wed Jul 01, 2009 9:05 am

Malakai wrote:Yeah, I've seen a few cards with a 16mb chip in them cheaper than the 64mb chip itself. Would adding 64mb even improve speed any more in a dos wg environment?

Probably wouldnt do all that much seeing as your only running a few drives on one of the channels. If you add another stack or drives or start running all
3 internal and the 2 extrnal drive channels it would probably make a big differance.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Wed Jul 01, 2009 2:12 pm

I also noticed at the hp site, these are only 80mb/s cards.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... D=tis06537

This things does a lot faster than my xseries 342 w/integrated u160 scsi, but would there be any speed increases going to a u160 or u320 with this type of cache, of course, using a hard drive that's u160 or u320? Or are we seeing as fast as we can get with DOS?