RAID
Author
Discussion

dern

Original Poster:

14,055 posts

303 months

Thursday 23rd September 2004
quotequote all
Can someone explain RAID to me please in very simple terms? I have ordered a new motherboard which just happens to have RAID capability on it.

Thanks,

Mark

Gaffer

7,156 posts

301 months

Thursday 23rd September 2004
quotequote all

gopher

5,160 posts

283 months

Thursday 23rd September 2004
quotequote all
Gaffer said:
www.acnc.com/raid.html


good link, I understood basic raid setups but this explains things very well.

Cheers

Paul

dern

Original Poster:

14,055 posts

303 months

Thursday 23rd September 2004
quotequote all
Ok, I think I understood that... can you confirm if I got that right...

My board supports 0, 1 and 0+1. If I go for raid mode 0 and I put two 80Gb drives configured for raid then I get one 160Gb logical drive but better performance that if I configured the two drives to run on say IDE-0 on a normal pc. The disadvantage is that if one of these drives dies then I lose all data on both as my logical drive is now dead. If I add another 120Gb drive I happen to have on one of the IDE sockets that isn't a RAID one (this board has 4 IDE sockets) then do a daily back up of the important stuff onto the 120Gb drive then I should be cool.

Does that sound about right?

If I use 2 80Gb drives (which I already have), would it matter if one was a 7200rpm drive and the other was a 5400rpm? I can't remember if they actuslly are different but sod's law say they will be.

Thanks,

Mark

puggit

49,462 posts

272 months

Thursday 23rd September 2004
quotequote all
If you can select RAIDs 0,1 and 0+1 then with 2 drives your options are limited to 0 and 1.

0 is striped, where the data is read/written using both drives simultaneously, sharing the data between them. This is quicker, but if one drive dies you've lost everything.

RAID 1 is mirrored - so if one drive fails you've got a carbon copy to be going with.

RAID 0+1 is striped and then mirrored (or is it mirrored then striped?!) - this means you've got speed and redundancy, but takes 4 disks. RAID 1+0 is better then RAID 0+1, but you don't seem to be offered that...

So - is it safety or speed that you want?