quick raid question

[Guest]

just 2 quick raid questions:
im building my first raid capable machine. i have 2 raid ide connectors, and 2 std ide conn. whats the best hook up for the 2 maxtor drives, and the 2 cd drives???
run sep. ribbons and configure all 4 as masters? or run some drives as slaves???
and the second question: is my data as safe and secure when stripping across 2 hdd's? or is it more suseptible to corruption? (speed-wise, is this whole raid thing worth it with only 2 hdd??????)

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Run them all as Masters. You will get better performance that way. Your ATAPI CDRom devices probably won't work on the RAID controller anyway.

Stripping doesn't have fault tolerance so your data IS NOT safe.

<font color=red>People and hard drives are like bandwagon fans and sports!</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

thanks 4 the answer at toms hardware....
is stripping 2 drives in a raid format less safe than running them as normal ide master/slave devices????

(thanks for your time)

 

[Lars_Coleman]

It should be about the same.

<font color=red>People and hard drives are like bandwagon fans and sports!</font color=red>

 

[ath0mps0]

Striping is slightly less safe because the probability of 1 drive failing is doubled when you have two. But, if you had purchased only one drive and you had purchase the one that would fail earlier (no way to tell ahead of time), you could still lose all of your data.

People talk about RAID based redundancy as if it is to prevent data loss - this is not the reason it was invented and is used in corporate environments. It is used to prevent downtime. With redundant RAID (1,5), the goal is to prevent a failure from stopping business. With RAID 1,5 you don't have to take the server down when a drive fails - you just wait until the day ends (or the weekend) and replace the drive when all the users have gone home and are off the system. If you have a high-end hot-swappable system you can even do all of this without even taking the server down.

Let me yell the following:

OFFSITE ROTATED BACKUP IS THE ONLY WAY (well the real man's/woman's way) TO PREVENT DATA LOSS. This backup should be daily or weekly (even hourly in some cases) depending on the amount of data changed during the specified time period. Backup to spare IDE HDDs is currently the least expensive and fastest option for large volumes. 2-3 disks rotated off-site (at least 1 off at all times) with removable drive bays on a weekly basis is the best way. Tape backup - even DLT and the like - has become more expensive (in time and equipment) than HDD. DLT and similar cartridges are now ~$60 each and are significantly slower than a removable HDD.

RAID is for perfomance (0,5) and for uptime despite failure (1,5). While RAID 1,5 can prevent you from having to restore from backup, it will do NO good if more than 1 drive fails before you notice (or in an earthquake, flood, fire, semi-truck accident, etc.).

I thought a thought, but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I had thought.