Raid or not to Raid?

[061070]

Anyone any thoughts on the above for a home PC?

[Matridom]

Most home raid comes in two flavours.

Striping and Mirroring.

Striping (raid 0) is where you put your file across two or more hard disks. the advantage is that you write speads go up. you are in essense writing to parts of the file at the same time on tww seperate hard disks. The disavantage is that if one drive dies, you loose all your information.

mirroring (raid 1) is where you put the same infomration on two drives. Your making a mirror copy of drive. In essence you have 2 copies of the same info. this allows you to read twice as fast. You can read two parts of a file off two different drives at the same time. The advantage is that if one drive dies, you have a backup, the downside is that you loose have your space.

Personaly i strip. you need to decided what you need and if it's worth the risk.

[ephmynus]

2 X Maxtor ATA133 7200RPM 80GB Drives

Raid0-striped

I love it.

[JungleMan1]

quote:

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Originally posted by Matridom:
Personaly i strip.

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Don't do it in front of us please

[MacGyver]

One of the biggest disadvantages to RAID on motherboards is that the hard drives cannot be moved to another mobo and then accessed like you would with a regular partition. If you want to upgrade your computer, you'll need to backup all your data on a different location, then restore the data once you have the new RAID array going.

Alternatively, you can purchase a third party PCI IDE controller with RAID built in, which will get you around the above issue since the RAID controller moves with the drives.

[format c:]

I had raid 0 and quit using it, due to some instablities with XP home and WIn 98
I found my sound blaster 5.1 to be at fault under XP so I may try it in the future
I have heard of some problems with raid , My friend and I used the Promise fastrack 100, Nice card
I guess I should have zero filled both drives before building the array , I had to zero fill when I quit using raid 0 , I went to the Promise ultra 133
Raid is a good idea for speed just make sure your dives are the same size

[Cygnus]

I agree with Mac on this one. I had a RAID0 setup here but the only advantage I really got from it was data redundancy. I keep my drives so clean that it never really showed me any speed advantages. It was nice having the backup in case one of the drives went down but because I like to take my drives out for work or to help out others sometimes it wasnt working out. I have a P2P network running here and could access the data remotely if I needed to so I just converted my file server over to a RAID config and left the others alone. That tends to work pretty good for me.

[Radical Dreamer]

RAID all the way baby...unless you can do something else that will up the load speed of stuff nearly %100...

[GokuSS2]

Were all dancing around the main question. If your a gamer NO. If your into video editing or have files that can't be lost YES.