• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

a few newb RAID questions

R

R@Mo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
Messages
185
I am looking to buy two Maxtor DM10 300GB 16MB SATA drives to use as storage for my movies/music. What I hope to acheive is to have both of them show up under a single drive letter in Windows, as one large ~600GB drive. I'm a little confused about a few things though...

1. If I set up the drives using JBOD, does that mean the drives are combined into a single drive letter?

2. I understand already that if I set up the drives in RAID 0, and one of the drives fail, then the data is lost from both drives. What I'm unsure about is if one drive fails, does that mean the other one also PHYSICALLY fails? Or do I just lose the data on it and I can reformat and reuse it?

3. Does anyone know if the Abit IC7-G supports JBOD on either of its 2 RAID controllers?

(Yes, I did use the search feature, and no, I didn't find the exact answers I was looking for.)

 
1) Yes, they have one drive letter and one file spanned across both drives. However, see #2.
2) If you have a 'RAID' (JBOD or RAID-0) with a single file system spanned or striped across multiple disks with no redundancy, the loss of any of the members trashes all of the data on all of the drives, instantly. However, you are correct that (unless something truly catastrophic like a power supply blow out happens) then the other member(s) of the array that are still mechanically sound can be rebuilt and put back into service.
3) The Intel ICH5R ports do not support JBOD IIRC. The secondary controller ports should.

Hard Drives do not protect data, they merely provide relatively fast access to it. RAID does not protect data, it protects uptime and/or provides additional capacity. Backups to removable media (CD/DVD or tape) are the only way to protect your data from loss.
 
Jbod you don't typically lose the data on all drives, you lose the data on the bad drive, and any single file that happens to exsist on both at once becuase of size/
 
Thank you for your replies. Things are a lot clearer now.

I understand that hard drives do not protect data. I actually already have everything backed up to DVD. It would just be nice to be able to have access to all of it at once, and at this point I'm limited by my single 120GB drive.

One other question. I read somewhere that when using lets say 2 hard drives in JBOD mode, the second hard drive never gets any data put on it until the first one fills up. True/false?

 
Both ;) Depends on the controller, and OS's write methods. If the controller and OS write files in order, then you will end up with the fall over approach that you describe and Defakto alluded to. However, as time goes on, file fragmentation, and other maintanence problems increase the likelihood of parts of a file being on both drives, in which case a failure will take that file with it.

Also, JBOD, at least as I understand it, uses a single file system for all of the members, so if a member fails you will have to resort to low level recovery tools to get any files that are contiguously on a remaining member.
 
So there really is no advantage to using JBOD over RAID 0 is there?

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top