What's RAID?

G

Guest

Guest
Can someone explain that to me. I've got a hunch... but can someone just tell me so i'm sure... and why do they say raid 0?

thnx

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G

Guest

Guest
Always wanted a technical explanation... not "2 hard drives good, 1 bad"
 
G

Guest

Guest
thnx a lot but one last question... actually two.

how much are these raid controllers
and can all new mobos take em fine?

There are only 3 types of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not!
 

girish

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RAID controller sits in ISA or PCI slot so all mobos should take them fine. but if you have a desktop system, you wont be really using the fastest SCSI hard drives and probabely having mission critical data that you could lay your life to protect. you could alway backup.

many boards today come with a simple IDE RAID controller some from Abit and MSI and Asus that implement just two basic types of RAID configuration.

RAID 0 is where you strip your data into two (or more) and store each part on either drive. you disk access speeds up to twice, since you are basically widening the channel for disk I/O. of course, if one disk conks off, you are lost but anyway it could happen with a single drive too.

RAID 1 mirrors all the data onto two (or more) drives so that whatever is on the first drive the second drive has it all. so if any one disk dies you have your data secure on the other. these RAID controllers also support the RAID 0+1 configuration that works with 4 drives and strips your data into two and makes two copies of it. so you get both speed as well as reliability, but will cost you four times as much.

btw this RAID appears as a single drive to the system, and using multiple disks does not contribute to the total storage capacity. just it speeds up your machine or protects your data. and these IDE RAID controller will support just the two+two drive configurations. andthat you need to have all your RAID disk of same capacity and speed else it will fall back to the lowest common factor or might have errors in its working.

if you dont have onboard RAID you can have IDE RAID cards from Promise Technologies.

girish

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G

Guest

Guest
What the hell?!?!?!?

you say having two drives on raid doesn't contribute to the total capacity?

So if i have two 40 gig hard drives running raid 0 the system will see only one 40 gig hard drive but twice as fast? That's messed up, doesn't it split the data? Should't it be one 80 gig hd twice as fast?

There are only 3 types of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not!
 
G

Guest

Guest
NO, it writes half the data to one hard drive, half to the other, splitting the data. The whole idea is using 2 hard drives as one to make it 2x faster.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Yea i know half data there half there... so 40 gigs there is first half and another 40 gigs there is second half... therefore the whole is 80 right? twice as fast?

so intead of having say 2 40 gigs at 5400 rpm you have an equivalent of one 80 gig at 10800 rpm or around there... correct?

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FatBurger

Illustrious
Correct, but it's only that fast in theory. In practice, it's a little slower.

That's only for RAID 0, BTW. The other types work differently.

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Whoever thinks up a good sig for me gets a prize :wink: <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by FatBurger on 07/30/01 02:56 PM.</EM></FONT></P>