TO RAID OR NOT?????

[bowl299]

I have just about decided to go with an IWILL KK-266 board but I can't decide if I should go raid or not. What are the pros and cons? All help will me helpfull.

What is the advantage to having raid?

 

[Tachyon]

bowl299 (May 11, 2001 07:21 p.m.):
I have just about decided to go with an IWILL KK-266 board but I can't decide if I should go raid or not. What are the pros and cons? All help will me helpfull.

What is the advantage to having raid?

With a RAID system, data is written across multiple drives simultaneously. The main benefit is productivity if you are dealing with large files such as PhotoShop or AutoCAD. Benchmarks will be higher and Windoze may load a little faster but for general use the benefit is minimal.

 

[mrpcman]

You won't notice a difference for stuff like word, but for intesive stuff, it makes a hecuva difference. Regardless, spend the extra $10 and get the raid motherboard. You don't have to have it setup in raid.

 

[Megahurtz]

The three potential types of RAID you'll be able to choose have different strengths and liabilities.

Rather than explain the three in detail here, I'll provide a link. Your options are RAID 0, Raid 1 and RAID 0+1.

The three types are explained here.

Please bear in mind that RAID 0, while offering the fastest disk access times, wites data to multiple drives simultaneously, hence if a drive should fail, you corrupt data on both drives. Not the best scenario.

T

 

[SickBoy]

First of all, I would like to state that I have a RAID capable mobo (Abit KT7A-R).

IDE RAID, especially in 0, 1, or 0+1 configuration, inherently has a few problems. IDE controllers can only write to one drive on a channel at a time. In addition, many motherboard-native RAID controllers, when putting 2 drives in RAID 0, fill one drive first and then the other, making it not a true hardware RAID. SO that basically nixes the benefits of IDE Raid.

An ideal RAID controller utilizes RAID 5 - if I am correct, this uses 3 drives, loses the capacity of 1 drive, and allows any drive to be rebuilt from the other two in case of failure. In my opinion, this is the most efficient and only worthwhile use of RAID. Most mobo-native RAID controllers cannot do RAID 5.

If you're serious about wanting to use RAID to get a fast and reliable array, you need to go SCSI raid in RAID 5. Yes, I have a RAID mobo- but I only got it because I wanted the ability to run an extra 4 IDE devices without buying a seperate controller. At any rate...... that's my spin on the subject.

SickBoy

 

[FNG]

do harddrives make a difference in things like 3dmark2000 and 2001?

 

[mrpcman]

not really in scores, but in the real world, it will make quite a difference on things that use the hard drive alot(like video).