I don't understand RAID

[yourharddrive]

I don't understand RAID....i mean what exactly does it do, and is it worth the money?

 

[serialb]

RAID article

 

[SphincterLord]

If you do it IDE then yeah, I think it is worth the money... I have three 34GXP 13.6GB IBM drives and they fly on a Promise FastTrack 66...

SL

 

[flashbacck]

what's the performance increase of a RAID 0 over a non-RAID single harddrive?

 

[Warin]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives

RAID is great if you need a LOT of storage and dont want to pay the rather high price for really expensive large drives. When using RAID 0 (striping) you also get a performance increase. The problem is that RAID 0 can be a nightmare if one drive fails, because then you lose all of the information. And using a RAID 01 configuration (striping + mirroring) tends to be rather costly.

RAID is cool so long as you understand it's limitations and benefits. If you are running in a sever environment, RAID 1 or RAID 5 is a must, as it offers the most security for mission critical information.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Slightly off topic...what do you guys think of imbedded RAID controllers vs. PCI RAID controllers? Has anyone benched these against one another?

 

[yourharddrive]

thanks....that article really helped

 

[cbuchach]

By imbedded RAID controllers you mean on the motherboard right?

Well, I have an imbedded Fastrack100 on my Asus A7V133. It is by most purposes the same exact thing that Promise sells on its separate RAID card. The only difference between the two is the BIOS. However, you can easily use the full Promise Fastrack100 BIOS on the A7V133 (just need to tweak it a bit). Also, the full Promise drivers will work fine on the imbedded chip.

So, though I have not directly compared the performance of each, it is safe to say that imbedded vs. add-on RAID really has no performance differences.