RAID questions

[Malpine Walis]

OK this is my first post.

After finally killing my old computer, I am going to build my next one.

One of the things that I am considering is having RAID hard drives. But before I make that decision, I need a quick tutorial on the subject.

Some of the things I would like to hear about are:

1. How many HD's do I need?
2. Do they need to be identical?
3. Does it matter whether I go IDE or SCSI?
4. How many possible configurations are there?
5. Why would I choose one configuration over another.

I could probably ask other questions but that should be enough for now.

[FRANK]

First of all, Welcome to the forums.

You are probably most interested in RAID 0, RAID 1 or a combination of both, RAID 0+1.

In a nutshell, RAID 0 is the writing of data to two (or more) hard drives simultaneously., with half going to one hard drive and the other half going to the other hard drive. When addressing this data, your system can move more data by retrieving it from multiple drives simultaneously. Although you may not get twice as fast throughput, there is a substantial increase. This array would be good when accessing large files such as for video / photo editing etc.

It is recommended that you use two identical drives for best compatibility. If you were to use two different sized drives, the array would default to the smallest drive of the array times two. Another thing to remember is that an ATA100 drive by itself would generally outperform ATA66 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Also, the failure of one drive renders the data on the other useless.


RAID 1 is an array that writes data to two hard drives as a mirror image of each other. This results in an identical "backup" copy of the entire hard drive. This set up would be utilized in a situation where the data would be hard, if not impossible to replace, such as bookkeeping etc.

The third array that I think you may be interested in would be the combination of both of the above arrays, RAID 0+1. In this array, you would need at least four drives. This arrangement of drives would give you the best of both worlds, with the fast transfers of RAID 0 as well as the redundancy of RAID 1.

SCSI will outperform an IDE drive with faster data transfer rates whether in a RAID array or stand alone. SCSI is also substantially more expensive, not only in the cost of the hard drives, but the additional controller card necessary to implement it. However with the decreasing cost of IDE hard drives along with the popularity of onboard IDE RAID controllers, the IDE solution is a very viable option for the average user.

Do a search on Google or the like for more information.

Try this link;
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

I hope this helps.

Good luck!

[Christoph]

Nice link, FRANK.
I've been looking for something like that for a while.
Now all I need to know is what RAID stands for.

[FRANK]

"Redundant Array of Independent Disks"

[JigPu]

RAID - Redundant Array of Independant Disks

:D

It's amazing how much stuff I've picked up over the months....:burn:

JigPu