RAID set up

[vood0g]

I want to start off by saying that I am new to the whole RAID set up. I did a little searching in the forum on what it is, and I have a question about it. From the readings, it seems as if RAID splits the work of a single hard drive into two drives. So my question is, if the two hard drives are copies of each other, does that mean that I am losing half of my total storage capacity? 2 100 gb hard drives will only store 100gb and not 200gb?

 

[biostud]

Exactly.

 

[cRaidz]

Not necessarily
RAID 0 will give you 2 x 100 = 200GB; a.k.a. "striping"; increased read and write;
RAID 1 will give you 2 x 100 = 100GB; a.k.a. "mirroring"; increased read; redundancy;

please read

 

[vood0g]

thx guys. that was very helpful. the link you gave answered most of my questions cRaidz. however, in that link it had mentioned disk failure in the RAID 0 set up. is there an increased chance of a disk failure because of the RAID set up, or is it just in the quality of the disk?

 

[Markfw]

And since nobody else said it, (at 4 posts) welcome to the forums!

 

[vood0g]

oh thank you! it's a pleasure being here. although, sometimes it feels a bit intimidating (more so than other forums) to post questions due to the high number of "techies" that are present, but the information gathered here is a good start (if not the finish) to the research of many of my computer related questions.

so about my second question about the RAID set up, does the set up increase the chances of disk failure? anybody?

 

[Markfw]

You will get a lot of answers on the question of increased chance of failure. Here's my take, anything that you really need should be backed up on a VERY regular basis, maybe even daily, and keep multiple copies of backup's (rotating the media, whatever it is) so that if one backup goes bad, you allways have another. That said, go raid0 for spped, or if you have the money, raid5 covers most chances of failure, but it os more exspensive, and harder to find for IDE. Raid1 doesn;t have much use for me.

 

[vood0g]

alrighty, sounds good to me. raid 0 will probably be the set up that i do. most of the stuff i have on my comp isnt that important to justify the extra cash.

thanks

 

[tweeve2002]

I've run a RAID 0 set up for the last 3 years...I have never had a problem exept for once when my PSU was trying to die and didnt suppy enough power to one of the drives. I lost my entire 223GB RAID 0 set up Now with a new PSU I an running two RAID 0 setups...on two diffrent cards...If you buy high quality drives and back up regually you should have a problem...Both my RAIDs on with WD drives.

 

[beatle]

Originally posted by: vood0g
oh thank you! it's a pleasure being here. although, sometimes it feels a bit intimidating (more so than other forums) to post questions due to the high number of "techies" that are present, but the information gathered here is a good start (if not the finish) to the research of many of my computer related questions.

so about my second question about the RAID set up, does the set up increase the chances of disk failure? anybody?

RAID 0 roughly doubles your chance of data loss in the event of a drive failure, since both drives have to be working in order to access the array.

And don't worry about the "techies." There are a lot of noobs (myself included on some things).

 

[vood0g]

hmm...double the chance of data loss...i didnt think to look at that way. well, so far i havent had any problems with any of my past hard drives (knock on wood), but maybe that's because i havent done any thing crazy to my comps. I have never even overclocked any of my comps since i dont know how, but will probably learn that from here when i get around to it.

are there any pre-cautionary measures that i can take to reduce the chance of the hard drive screwing up on me?

 

[cRaidz]

I've been running RAID 0 for about 4 years, and just built my new machine around it during christmas break.

As far as reliability, I just keep my drives cool with a low rpm fan, backup often (Lots of ways to do both). Haven't had a problem except my latest creation is giving me SMART errors. RMA on the way.