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RAID for Dummies

G

Geocross

Member
I'm really not that familiar with RAID, but from what I gather, It's faster that ATA-100 connections (am I wrong?). My question is, if I have only one hard drive with a RAID hookup on my MB, can/should I connect my Hard drive to that? I read a little about RAID (the 1+0, 1+1 stuff), and I had a less clear understanding of it after, so I would appreciate a simple explanation. Thanks alot.
 
On RAID... I am not de experta guy... but I can contribute a bit ...

You can't have a RAID system with only one RAID drive hooked up ... you need two drives.. There are actually different types of RAID configurations ... some just use 2 drives, others use 4... others use 5 (1 is parity) ... and I believe there are also 8 and 9(parity) drive configurations ...

I don't believe the RAID bus is any faster than your typical bus ... But it uses multiple drives to write the same data .. So instead of writing every bit to the same hard drive, you divide the data between the hard drives and each hard drive writes or reads its piece of the whole ...

A simple way to illustrate this would be to picture a 9 drive RAID configuration (I believe these exist)..
You have 8 bits in a byte... So if you had 9 drives, each drive could be responsible for each bit, and then 9th drive is used for parity (even/odd bits) ... The parity drive is used to restore the data if a drive should crash ... If two drives crash, then your screwed ... If the parity drive crashes, just rebuild the data...

In essence, a hard drive can only read/write so fast ... But if you split the data into multiple parts, then each hard drive is only responsible for reading or writing 1/numOfDrives data... And that is how it gets faster drive access...

I know the theory, but I will readily admit ignorance on the actual details of how it works... Unless you are REALLY into this sort of stuff, or unless this is for a major server, I wouldn't suggest spending the extra money for this feature.. You also will have to hook up the drives in uniform fashion according to the RAID level your system supports.


I hope this is information clear, and more important correct..
 
It is DEFINATLY faster...at least if you use RAID 0
Putting an IDE drive on your onboard raid will no yeild any improvements for you...IF you have it on an ATA/66/33 channel and your raid is an ATA/100 channel then you would notice improvement. Otherwise, get another HD and try out the raid feature...VERY nice...you will notice it immediatly if you do anything that involves disk access (if you dont you need a palm pilot for your computer 😉)
 
OK. I've searched all the RAID threads, didn't see the answer to this RAID0 question:
Has anyone tested the different block sizes to see which works the best (as in fastest performance) in Windows 98SE??

I saw someone say 64k was best for winblows2000, but nothing on what was best for winblows 98SE.

Thanks in advance
 
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