n00b pondering

H

hacktor2

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2004
Messages
263
alright i just realized i didn't know how you guys get those drives up into the terabytes. I know you have more then one harddrive, so how do you get multiple harddrives to act as one big one? so if i were to buy 4 250 gigs what would i use to make them "one". Raid? Partion Magic? What? Thanks
 
You would be using either a hardware or a software raid solution to use multiple drives as one drive. Hardware raid is done by either onboard (on your motherboard) raid or a separate raid card that you would add to your system. Software raid is done by the operating system (support varies for different operating systems).
 
raid, usually raid 0 and 5, join a bunch of disks into one. Windows XP knows how to do 0 in software, you need a server version for 5. Linux knows how to do 0, 1, 3, 5, and 6 out-of-the-box. Free. Hardware raid controllers, starting at about $200 for an 8-port (highpoint 1820/2220) do basically the same thing but with lower CPU usage. It's not worth it (IMO) to pay the premium if it's just a storage machine (not playing games, in other words) or if the array will be accessed over a network. Ethernet is much slower than software raid, which cranks pretty good if nothing else is hitting the processor. My p4 2.4c can do 2 GB/s of raid 6 calculations if nothing else is using the CPU, which isn't too bad ;)

 
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