[RESOLVED] what is RAID and how will it help me

[bor_yam]

First thing: What is RAID?
Second thing: How will it help me?

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You got to know when to fold them....

[Rocinante]

Raid means redundant array inexpensive disks i believe thats the correct acronym. What will it do for you, and how does it work, well basically instead of having 1 phisical hard drive, you will install 2 or more drives in the same computer. There are different levels or raid, 0,1,3,5.

Raid mode 0 will increase performance as blocks of data are spread across numerous hard drives, this is called stripping.

Raid mode 1 allows disk mirroring, which means if one drive dies, the second drive takes over.

Raid Mode 3 is simular to mode 0, but reserves 1 dedicated disk for error checking for fault tollerance.

Raid Mode 5 Provides data stripiing like modes 0, but incorperates excellent fault tollerances and very good performance.

You would need this technology if data is very inportant to you, i,e. your system was running as a server. The extra performance that you can gain would be good if you were maybe doing video work etc.

Now i think i got it right but please correct me if im wrong

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on tonights menu - special fried bios

[lgsracer]

Storage Review has a good overview of Raid and its benefits and/or drawbacks at:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...edundancy.html

[Nighthand]

You're close enough for government work. RAID 0 will let you add a bunch of drives together to come up with 1 larger drive, like two 30 gigs read as 1 60 gig. It is the fastest of the RAID levels, but provides no data recovery. RAID 5 is the best, because it provides good speed and data recovery, but most of the IDE RAIDs don't support it yet (actually, there might not be any). Generally, you want to use the same size drives in your array.

[bor_yam]

Thanks Guys Or girls. I appreciate your help.

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You got to know when to fold them....

[chardk]

How would I know if I need a RAID card? I am shopping for a new server and have been told I need one.. However, we are running another server here with mirrored disks and I don't believe there is any RAID hardware installed.. I figured I could just mirror the disks..

Any thoughts?

[Budster64]

what Green said.

best I've seen is RAID 0+1 for IDE, which gives you Raid 0 for two drives and a mirror.