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How exactly does raid work? Say i buy 2x160gb SATAII hd's and put them in RAID-0, I was told i'll pretty much only have 160 gb's still, just mirror'd data and such, just a little confoozled
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CGR said:No... Raid 1 is mirrored. With raid 0 you will have almost the combined storage capacity. So two 160gb drives will give you around 320gb space. Of course you lose some in the formating.
nd4spdbh2 said:you dont lose n e thing.... its just the units of measure become a little bigger... Hard driver manufactures work in a system of base 10... so 10^3 = 1000, but the only way a computer can look at it is in binary or base 2... so 2^10 = 1024 or the closest base 2 can get to 1000.... n e ways a drive says its 160gb in base 10 meaning very close to 160000000000 Bytes (160 x 1000mb/gb x 1000kb/mb x 1000 bytes/kb)... so now in computer lingo a GB = 1024mb, 1mb = 1024kb, 1kb = 1024 bytes. so all you have to do to figure out the formatted capacity is to take the number of bytes in base 10 and divided it by the units in base 2... in other words divide 160000000000 by 1024 3 times... gets you 149.01GB... you dont loose any space its just the units of measure become different size... its sorta like calling a kilometer a mile, and comparing that kilometer mile to a regular mile and saying that the distance just dissapears.
sorry i have always hated when ppl say they "loose space" when they format...
N E WAYS... there are many different types of raid but mainly ppl use raid 0 to gain performance because it will be using 2 drives in parallel, with raid 0 you double the number of GB's of the smallest drive. so in your caseu you would have 320gb of unformatted space or 298GB's of formatted space with close to twice the performance of a single drive. The only way you really get half the space is in raid 1 like the guy above me said...
CGR said:You do lose some space. A 160gb drive will NOT format to 160gb. It will be in the 150's somewhere because of the cluster size.
MadMan007 said:He's right you do lose some actual storage space to cluster size loss. It's not visible in the 'total formatted size' but what happens is, unless every file is an exact multiple of the cluster size which doesn't happen, every file or part of a file that doesn't take up a complete cluster wastes the rest of the space for the cluster in which it's stored.