Yes Rad, you did save my butt from a few bad mistakes when I ran into your Ghost guide.  Thanks, a bunch!

I got a new AMD 1.53 machine from Polywell, but I'm reworking it so much I really wished I'd just built it myself. Still figuring out how I want to set it all up, so the guides are in my hand now. Planning to use for work, video editing, midi recording/mix, finances, & everything else in my e-life.  Running XP and thinking about how to create multi partitions of XP with just the OEM disk.  

Have a pair of IBM 60GXP 60gb on IDE, and about to plug in 2 more into the mobo raid for raid-0 (ghostless, no doubt).  Ghost imaging of boot disk to separate disk failed after 1st 2GB file... says the target disk is full, but it's not.  Tried creating new parts with gdisk, same deal. Problem is related to fact that doing DIR from DOS (on any disk but boot) lists the files, then hangs a second, then says "problem with your file alloc table".  Any ideas out there?

Meanwhile, I just burned an image over to CD, and it worked  great first time. Now I can go play.  Thanks for the guides.

Hi.

Have you tried forcing the span by using switches/arguments such as:

ghostpe.exe -split=1900 -auto

.. before the file/program reaches the 2-gig point?

Rad

Rad,
Yes, tried those and others with no difference. I'll work it out, thanks.

btw, been playing with raid and ghost. i was amazed that i can both save and restore images to/from raid-0 disks. to dos they just look and act like other ide drives. this is onboard promise raid 20265 on a gigabyte board. fyi.

Also benchmarking the raid vs ide using Sandra, and love what i see.  even the Last 10gb of 120gb raid stripe outperforms the First 5gb of a single 60gig. So i'm giving some serious thought to using raid-0 even for the OS ('s), in spite of the mtbf issue.

Can post a link to benchmarks etc here, when finished, if it sounds interesting.  Anyway, thanks for your help, and nice place you've got here!

PS: Also been watching Wendy's videos and they're great. Especially the tribute to Van... which was beautiful. :'(

.. ah, the Van video . she cried all the way thru that. I remember tears falling on the scanner.

When you say 'performing' for the array, you're talking about STR (sustained transfer rates), but STRs are not a good metric to indicate how well a drive will run your OS.

Seek/access times are a much better indicator, as servicing an OS consists of shuttling many small files. It doesn't matter how fast of a rate the array can sustain, if it spends all it's time *seeking*.

A stripe does nothing to improve a drive's seek time, which is a function of the drive itself. Some say that an array can even raise the access time by adding time to negotiate the transfers.

It's like using a high speed communtor train as a city bus. It will never get up to it's full speed, cuz it'll be stopping so often to pick up passengers.

Arrays are good for things involving long, sustained transfers, like audio & video files, for example.

I delve deeper into this in the SCSI guide, if your interested in more.

Hi,
Tried raid for boot, & it does 'feel' faster, but overall seemed like a bad idea, and it would've tied my boot and audio drives together. Not so cool. So i'm back to using raid for just video files. You were right. Thanks.
8)

Gladly.