when raid 0 dies -- how bad?

[headcrash]

With the type of IDE RAID 0 found on motherboards, when they start to fail do they fail gradually? I understand you wouldn't want to store critical data on RAID 0 (w/o backup) but it would be nice to be able to copy off what you can if there are only a small number of bad blocks.

Or when there are bad blocks does the whole thing go poof! and do you lose everything in the set? Thanks.

 

[Toejam31]

RAID 0 is technically not not a RAID level since it provides no fault tolerance.

Data is written in blocks across multiple drives, so one drive can be writing or reading a block while the next is seeking the next block.

The advantages of striping are the higher access rate, and full utilization of the array capacity. The disadvantage is there is no fault tolerance - if one drive fails, the entire contents of the array become inaccessible.

Fact: A striped array without redundancy has substantially lower reliability than a single drive <i>and</i> has no fault tolerance.

In other words, usually it goes "poof"!

<A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/newsletter/vol2/33/raid.html" target="_new">IDE Training Course, Part 3: Using RAID</A>

<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/rel.htm" target="_new">Fault Tolerance</A>

If you intend to run RAID 0 without a good backup method, may I recommend:

<A HREF="http://www.diskdoctors.com/RAID Recovery.htm" target="_new">Disk Doctors Lab, Inc. - Complete Data Recovery Services!</A>

Toey

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