[RESOLVED] RAID

[brewmandan]

Can anyone point me in the right direction to where I can find information on RAID? Im looking for the pros/cons, size of HDD's, etc. I'm thinking of building a new machine with an IWill KA266-R MoBo... It has 4 IDE connectors (does this mean a possibility of 8 drives?... not that I want that many)

Dan

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be warned of the luck of the rabbit's foot. After all, look at what luck it brought him.

[Valkerie]

Look at who manufactures them and visit their websites Abit, Adaptec, Compaq, DPT, HP, Promise (IDE) and so on.

Do you know about the different types of raid ?
there are about 3 :

1 there is full drive image/mirroring
2 striped parity (rebuilds data from remaining the drives on the fly)
3 and the another that i cannot remember off of the top of my head

Alledgedly RAID can also be faster than single drives as well, theory is that if all the drives work at the same time then the data is transfered quicker (many hands make light work).

RAID also used to primarilarly SCSI but now works on IDE as well

[Valkerie]

Visited a website and here is the low down on RAID, hope it answers all questions !!!!

Using RAID arrays inside a PC offers much greater flexibility, depending on application usage. Different RAID levels perform different functions.

RAID 0 (known as "striping") basically links each drive in the array as one huge drive. Storage capacity is determined by the smallest drive in the array. That capacity is then applied to format all other drives in the array. If using a 4GB, 6GB, 5GB drive in a RAID 0 array, your system will see one huge drive of 12GB (4GB x 3) versus 15GB. RAID 0 offers double or more performance under sustained data transfers when one drive per IDE port is used. In such a configuration, unlike SCSI, IDE drives are always available to the system. SCSI requires more management of the SCSI bus.

Spanning: If a user wishes to obtain all the capacity of the drives in an array, he may also choose to "span" the drives. Unfortunately, there are no other benefits except capacity with the spanning solution.

RAID 1 (known as "mirroring") makes and maintains an identical image of data from one drive to a second drive or from multiple drives to a second set of multiple drives. Should one drive fail, the working drive or drive set continues operating. To the system, such an array is still seen as a single drive letter. While RAID 1 is the least efficient use of hard drives to provide data protection (since the user does not see any of the additional storage capacity of the mirrored drives), low-cost IDE makes it acceptable. If performing 1-to-1 mirroring with two 4GB drives, the system only sees one 4GB drive. IDE RAID 1 represents a significantly lower cost than SCSI RAID 1.

RAID 5 uses a mathematical expression that compares data from two drives and calculates a third piece of data called "parity". Should one of the drives fail, parity data can be used to rebuild the failed data. Under RAID 5, parity data is stored across all drives in the array. This maximizes the amount of storage capacity available from all drives in the array while still providing data redundancy.

[MacGyver]

There is an excellent article on RAID and what the different RAID types are. Check it out here! (http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html)

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Tech: "You need to pack up your entire computer and bring it back in to us."
Customer: "Why?"
Tech: "BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO STUPID TO OWN A COMPUTER!"

[brewmandan]

Thanks for the info. Thats exactly what I needed to find. Now I guess I need to consider if I actually need RAID or not...

Dan

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be warned of the luck of the rabbit's foot. After all, look at what luck it brought him.