is a raid controller the same thing as an ide controller?

[Ph33zy]

like topic says

 

[jmcoreymv]

RAID can be for either IDE or SCSI drives. I believe it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. There are numerous types of raid such as raid 1-10 but the most common are 0,1,5. 0 is striping. 1 is mirroring. 5 is like striping with fault tolerance.

 

[Ph33zy]

can you or someone else go more into detail about raid...not sure exactly what it does..thanks for the help

 

[jmcoreymv]

Well striping, i believe writes 64k blocks of data to 2 or more drives and reads in this order to. That way it can speed up the amount of data it can read or write. Raid 1 (mirroring) writes everything duplicately to two drives, so if one drive fails, the other works. Raid 5 is a bit more complex, it needs at least 3 drives, and like one drive is the parity drive and the rest are the data drives that are striped (i could definitely be wrong on this) and this way if any drive goes down, they can rebuild the one that crashed.

 

[BurnItDwn]

More on stripping ... its not Only 64k blocks ... i know most IDE raid controllers will let you set different sizes.

I always thought raid5 needed 4 discs ... but as you have said jmcoreymv ... "i could definatly be wrong on this" .. and i may be as well ...

SCSI Raid controllers are much more advanced then the simple IDE ones ... they allow for double digit numbers of hot-swappable drives amongst other things ... and they cost thousands and thousands of dollars to set up often too ...

 

[John]

http://www.promise.com/ATARaid/

 

[medic]

What John and others said, as well...

What is RAID?
RAID is a family of techniques for managing multiple disks to provide desirable cost, data availability and performance characteristics to host environments.

More Info:

 

[Ph33zy]

sorry if this is a dumb question...i have no knowlege on raid whatsoever...but what is the purpose in using a raid controller? What are some of the uses?

 

[Ph33zy]

thanks guys!