What is raid?!?

[Pers]

ok...i realize this is a lamerz question, but what is raid? I mean is it like another form of scsi or is it totally not related? And those motherboards that have raid in their names....what exactly does that mean?!?

 

[ninjazed]

Redundant Array of Independant Devices i.e. using multiple hard drives for the purpose of speeding data transfer of mainatining data integrity. There's alot more to it than that but you get the idea....I hope.

 

[Pers]

can you give me a link to find more info on it please....

 

[bex0rs]

Nothin' like good ole Ars.

Check it out here

~bex0rs

 

[bex0rs]

BTW, there are serveral out there, but I'm just partial to Ars.

~bex0rs

 

[kingink]

I thought it was redundant array of inexpensive disks. haha, not so when dealing with scsi raid. You use raid for fault tolerance and speed performance. the benefits aren't really all that great for a single user environment b/c you don't always notice or utilize the gains in speed b/c of processing or the type of use. However, some people do
put their machines to task and squeeze everything out of them. RAID would be good for someone running servers off their home cable or dsl or someone who did av stuff.
these are the raid levels and a brief description of each

raid 0 striping --spreads out the blocks of each file across multiple disks
but doesn't provide fault tolerance. provides better access times and speed.
raid 1 mirroring -- writes data to two identical disks at the same time. provides
redundancy, in case of one disk failing the other can be used as it contains the same data.

raid 0,1 mirroring and striping

raid 3 same as level 0, but reserves a disk for error correction

raid 5 parity parity parity -provides data striping at the byte level across all disks and stripe error correction (parity.) since all numbers have a parity you can use this to enusre the validity of your data. This is known as parity checking.

hope this helps. I think I am right about most of this except the raid 5. check up on the raid 5. yeah.


kingink