RAID - What is it exactly?

[laruth]

Hi
I am looking at upgrading my motherboard to support 266FSB, I am looking at the MSI K7T Turbo as it is fairly cheap. What I would like to know is what exactly does RAID do, I know you get two extra IDE ports but I only have 1 hard drive and 2 cd rom drives, if I was to put my hard disk into the RAID ports would it increase in performance? Also would I be able to have my CDRW in IDE 0, DVD in IDE 1 and my hard disk in IDE 2 (RAID) or in another order?

Thanx

 

[zzzz]

<< , if I was to put my hard disk into the RAID ports would it increase in performance? >>


no. not for a single hard drive



<< Also would I be able to have my CDRW in IDE 0, DVD in IDE 1 and my hard disk in IDE 2 (RAID) or in another order? >>


yes. Some manufacturers suggest not to put the ATAPI devices(zip, CD) on the raid controller though.

 

[Speedie]

<Geek>

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is designed to increase disk subsystem performance and/or provide fault tolerance. There are 3 levels in general use these days:

RAID 0: Requires 2 x HD. Splits your data up (&quot;Stripes&quot; it) between the 2 disks. This gives a big increase in read/write performance, but provides zero fault tolerance.

RAID 1: Requires 2 x HD. Copies your data (&quot;Mirrors&quot; it) identically on both drives. Write operations are slower than a normal system due to duplication. Mirroring provides reasonable fault tolerance in that if one of the hard drives fails, the system can continue using the other drive - hence no downtime or data loss. &quot;Duplexing&quot; also falls under RAID 1 and is the same as mirroring except that seperate controllers are used for each disk. This provides additional redundancy in that you are protected against one of the controllers failing. Duplexing also helps eliminate the slow writes encountered with mirroring as the system can write to both disks at once, and most systems can also balance I/O requests between the controllers for fast reads.

RAID 5: Requires 3 x HD. Stripes your data across all disks in the set, and does so with parity. This provides good fault tolerance since the data on any particular disk can be reconstructed (should it fail) using parity information on the other disks in the set. RAID 5 is where it's at for systems requiring high data redundancy and decent performance.

If you're interested, RAID 3 and 4 both dedicate one disk to storing parity information (so minimum of 3 disks required in total). They are slow to recover in the event of a disk failure and largely inefficient. Virtually anyone with 3 disks at their disposal will use RAID 5 instead.

</Geek>

Glad you asked eh?

Speedie
A+ Certified Service Professional

 

[NelsonMuntz]

The RAID controller is a great place to keep your hard drive even if you don't have it set up in an array because then it keeps the regular IDE controllers open for other devices like your CR-RW or DVD drives.

 

[laruth]

Cheers. That's made my mind up, I think I will go with the RAID at least I know it does what I want!

 

[Athlon4all]

Just a suggestion, read Anand's article on RAID. Link

 

[chainbolt]

simple: RAID 0 (best with 4 HDD) is the LIGHT, &quot;the RAID is my SHEPARD&quot;