Raid

Discussion in 'Storage Devices' started by Temporal, Oct 13, 2003.

  1. Temporal

    Temporal Geek Trainee

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    I'm sorta confused on this topic... well let's just be honest I have no idea what this means... I see RAID capable products and I have no idea what advantages this has over whatever the opposing Harddrive setup is. Like, what is the difference between RAID 1 and 0... What is different when useing RAID opposed to when not ..? An explanation, or juts a link with some info for me to read would be greatly appreciated... Thanks in advance
    ~Temporal~
     
  2. Big B

    Big B HWF Godfather

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    http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html

    That's one of the best links I know of. You can also check out Storage Review if you want even further technical explainations on all things relating to hard drive storage.

    To summarize, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It takes 2 or more hard drives and makes them appear as one. In most cases, it works with the smallest physical hard drive, which is why you want to use matched hard drives. With RAID 0, if you take 2 20GB hard drives in this mode, you have 1 40GB hard drive. This is about the fastest setup you can get, but if you happen to have either drive fail, you're fucked, since half the data is written on the failed drive. In the case of RAID 1, it takes the 2 20GB hard drives and makes them appear as one. One of the hard drives is a hardware backup, so if one drive fails, you've got a backup ready to go. The biggest issue with this is that the same data is written to both drives, and makes this the slowest. RAID 0 is fastest because it writes 1 stream of data across 2 hard drives.

    Personally, I like the extra RAID capable controllers so I can add more hard drives to it. I've got 6 drives in my main box (and room for more). Since IDE can only access one drive at a time, I have each drive on it's own channel.
     
  3. Temporal

    Temporal Geek Trainee

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    Wow, I just finished reading that article and I am enlightened in the area of RAID... Thanks much Big B. Heh Looks like i'm gonna be useing RAID 0. (we all backup our files anyways right?) Heh, Thanks again..
    ~Temporal~
     
  4. Big B

    Big B HWF Godfather

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    That's why I have a file server. ;)
     

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