What exactly is RAID?

[jamezzz122]

I have been hearing a lot about RAID when it comes to harddrives. What is it? Is RAID for IDE, SATA, etc?

 

[cgrant26]

Judging by the fact your [H] status is 2[H]4U, I have a strong suspicion your already know.
But just for shits and giggles, its a generic term for running an array of CoOp drives that act as 1 drive. It stands for Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Disks. RAID controllers can be built for pretty much any opticle storage data bus; SCSI, IDE, SATA, Etc. There are two basic RAID modes; "striped" and "mirrored"
A striped array (RAID-0)combines the capacity of 2 or more disks and and improves performance by writing data simultaniously to both drives. Of course it's risky because if 1 drive fails in a striped array, the whole array fails and data goes bye, bye.
A mirrored array (RAID-1) offeres no performance gains, but duplicate data is written to both drives. In the event that one fails, the data is still preserved on the good drive and the bad one can simply be replaced and the array rebuilt. This is basically real-time backup.
You can run different combinations of arrays. A RAID 0+1 array would be 2 seperate striped arrays mirrored together. This would take a minimum of 4 disks, but could theoretically be any multiple of 4 that is more than 4. (I read somewhere about a (0+1) 160 disk array)

 

[sm8000]

Google

 

[jamezzz122]

Judging by the fact your [H] status is 2[H]4U, I have a strong suspicion your already know.
But just for shits and giggles, its a generic term for running an array of CoOp drives that act as 1 drive. It stands for Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Disks. RAID controllers can be built for pretty much any opticle storage data bus; SCSI, IDE, SATA, Etc. There are two basic RAID modes; "striped" and "mirrored"
A striped array (RAID-0)combines the capacity of 2 or more disks and and improves performance by writing data simultaniously to both drives. Of course it's risky because if 1 drive fails in a striped array, the whole array fails and data goes bye, bye.
A mirrored array (RAID-1) offeres no performance gains, but duplicate data is written to both drives. In the event that one fails, the data is still preserved on the good drive and the bad one can simply be replaced and the array rebuilt. This is basically real-time backup.
You can run different combinations of arrays. A RAID 0+1 array would be 2 seperate striped arrays mirrored together. This would take a minimum of 4 disks, but could theoretically be any multiple of 4 that is more than 4. (I read somewhere about a (0+1) 160 disk array)

A thanks...I have always been running one IDE drive so I don't know about these harddrive things.

So if I get a 120GB to go with my current 80GB, I can RAID those two? If I RAID it, I can partition the drives into two 100GB partitions if I wanted right? But what If I didn't? I would have to run them as 80 and 120?

 

[djnes]

A thanks...I have always been running one IDE drive so I don't know about these harddrive things.

So if I get a 120GB to go with my current 80GB, I can RAID those two? If I RAID it, I can partition the drives into two 100GB partitions if I wanted right? But what If I didn't? I would have to run them as 80 and 120?

I think you should do more reading on RAID. It's a pretty simple concept once you do. You'd need matching drives, so I wouldn't trust using the two you mentioned. Also, it would make your 120 GB drive an 80 GB...so you'd be wasting 40 GB. Be sure to read all the tests and articles about RAID0 being useless, worthless, and risky to 99% of all uses.

 

[jamezzz122]

I think you should do more reading on RAID. It's a pretty simple concept once you do. You'd need matching drives, so I wouldn't trust using the two you mentioned. Also, it would make your 120 GB drive an 80 GB...so you'd be wasting 40 GB. Be sure to read all the tests and articles about RAID0 being useless, worthless, and risky to 99% of all uses.

Ah...I didnt know that the same drives were needed...So what do oyu recommend I do with my 120GB and 80GB IDE drives?

I want like a 50GB partition for OS and APPS and the rest of the 150GB for media. Would this be possible? To have a partition made of space form two drives?

 

[djnes]

It's possible, but not recommended. You make a 50GB C drive, 30 GB D drive, and a 120 GB E drive. My personal recommendation in your situation would be to use the 80 GB for the OS, applications, and games, and then use the second drive for storage. I've always had 2 hard drives in my computers...one for installs, and one for storage.

 

[QHalo]

I'm allergic to ignorance, and your making me itchy

I believe that would be you're unless you're being facecous.

Sorry dude, but I had to post on it...it made me lol

Djnes is right though, RAID is only for specific reasons or pure bragging rights. But how much can you brag when your RAID0 dies and you have to reinstall your OS?

Stick with two drives, unless you're running a file server or need high speed read writes. And if that is ever the case, I would go with SCSI RAID. But I'm biased and have a deeper schluff fund than most.

 

[lithium726]

well, you can do a 50gb part and then do software spanning within windows with dynamic drives to span the 30 and 120gb drives togehter to make one big 150gb drive within windows.

 

[djnes]

I'm allergic to ignorance, and your making me itchy

I believe that would be you're unless you're being facecous.

Sorry dude, but I had to post on it...it made me lol

D'oh, thanks for the heads-up!