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Unread 25 May 2006, 14:34   #1
JammyJim
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Raid

Sooooo

I remember in the olden days when i first got an 850meg drive i thought 'wow ill never need to buy another hdd again!!!! its huge!!!!'

Then that quickly became too small so upgraded.....20gig...40gig..80gig.....then combining the 80 and 40 together to make 120gig which worked for about 3 years.

Last year i purchased a 250gig Samsung spinpoint...supposedly one of the better drives and recommended by quiet pc for its silent operation.


I remember when i first got it up and running and had around 180gig free after all the junk copied across "wow ill not need to upgrade for yonks!'


Over the past 4 days ive been deleting things....i have 5gig free...5 gig out of 250....'ut oh spaghettios'


I just popped into PCworld as i was passing to buy a HDD enclosure for an old 80 gig job but at the same time i spotted the same 250gig drive for 70 quid (reduced a bit)...scan had it for about 2 quid less with postage but its worth spending the 2 quid as i can touch it and install it instantly instead of sitting here thinking 'ooo im so excited a hard drive is arriving tomorrow...its like christmas' (not reallty but you take the point). I bought the samsung 250gb and the enclosure...


Ive installed and got it up and running. As its SATA i have the VIA RAID tool telling me i can 'make it all raid' yo...


now i have no idea what that means.


CAn someone explain to me what will happen if i click on :

'1'

'span'

'0'

buttons at the top


I dont and cannot afford to lose any data from my c:\ drive....the new 250gb is setup as d:\ and is accessible already...

IS there a definite advantage in Raiding it up yo or shuld i just be happy with what i have and be done with it.

500gig...


ill never need to upgrade again!
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Unread 25 May 2006, 14:55   #2
CjC
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Re: Raid

Raid in the case of SATA can be used for two things:

0 is striping - which means that the data is split between the two drives (I think by default 64KB chunks), therefore the data is saved on both drives at the same time thus speeding up read/write access.

1 is mirroring, which means that the data is copied onto both drives.

So, if you chose 0, you would get 500GB, but if one drive failed u would lose the lot (Because 1/2 the data is on that drive and the other half of the data for each file would be on the broken drive).

If you chose raid 1 - this would give you 250GB but if one drive failed the other would continue to hold a copy of everything. Therefore you can recover all data without backups yo!

I guess span is just expansion of volume (So both drives would be treated as one drive but not striped or mirrored).

The only advantage you would have is Mirroring for protection of data, but that only gives you 250GB of disk space, I wouldnt recommend striping because of the above (Raid 5 is the best striping strategy but not available for SATA to my knowledge).

In any case I suspect you would need to rebuild the disks from scratch (Raid generally needs to reformat drives). Havent tried mirroring with one disk already populated so dont know if that would work. Striping would need a rebuild, spanning probably not.
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Unread 25 May 2006, 15:25   #3
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Re: Raid

im going to leave it all alone then and just bask in 500gig until i run out again.

ta
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Unread 25 May 2006, 17:05   #4
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Re: Raid

Quote:
Originally Posted by CjC
I guess span is just expansion of volume (So both drives would be treated as one drive but not striped or mirrored).
Yes - its also often called JBOD (just a bunch of disks) because sector adressing is simply extended across the drives.

Quote:
Originally Posted by CjC
(Raid 5 is the best striping strategy but not available for SATA to my knowledge).
Every Raid level is available to every controler/mediatype in general because you can just implement them with a software driver. Raid-5 needs a bit of CPU power so hardware support is usually "needed" to speed it up but affordable controlers for SATA 1/2 are available for a while (SATA Raid). But Raid 5 isnt "only" a striping strategy.
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Unread 25 May 2006, 18:06   #5
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Re: Raid

Right decision imo.

RAID is a complete waste of time outside of certain specialised (high-volume) server uses.
RAID 0 doubles the chances of data loss on the logical drive (two drives = twice the chance of failure) for an entire 10% (on average) speed increase. Woah dude, that's totally worth it.
Span is similar.
RAID 1 halves the chances of data loss on the logical drive with the slight downside that it's horrendously expensive in terms of £/MB as it doubles that cost.

RAID 5 and derrivatives are more sensible solutions, but require expensive hardware support cards if you don't want to be relying on the processor to do it, and need at least 3 drives to work.

In other words, forget it
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Unread 25 May 2006, 21:39   #6
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Re: Raid

Quote:
Originally Posted by meglamaniac
RAID 0 doubles the chances of data loss on the logical drive (two drives = twice the chance of failure) for an entire 10% (on average) speed increase. Woah dude, that's totally worth it.
I regularly use a Raid-0 setup as its great if you have to process large volumes of data and it nearly doubles the speed of the single hard disk. I would certainly question your "10% on average" number.

Since Raid-0 is nearly computationally free, a software Raid-0 is nearly the same speed as a "hardware" Raid-0. Actually the reason why you get Raid-0 with so many controllers and BIOSes nowadays is that they simply do it by software with 2/4 additional IDE channels.

But yes - you should have a backup of all data which resides on Raid-0 volumes.

Quote:
Originally Posted by meglamaniac
RAID 1 halves the chances of data loss on the logical drive with the slight downside that it's horrendously expensive in terms of £/MB as it doubles that cost.
Its certainly questionable - but any decent Raid-1 setup also increases the disk throughput quite noticeable (if the drivers are worth anything).
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Unread 28 May 2006, 14:32   #7
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Re: Raid

heh, not really relevant or helpful but I remember back in the day when I thought my 100Mb HDD was the shit. (It fit Doom, DOS & Windows 3.1.. what more could I need?)

and you certainly could do worse, I have a friend with a 2 terrabyte raid in his home computer, he has a total of 50mb left.
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