what is raid

[sao95]

my mobo has it but i don't know what it is?

[DVNT1]

see http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/...214332,00.html

[John Prophet]

Stands for "Redunadant Array of Inexpensive Disks"

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

RAID is just different methods for hooking up more than one hard drive to accomplish fault tolerance, for disaster recovery, backup purposes.

RAID 0 (which isnt really redundant after all) is when you have two or more drives and you "stripe" the data between the drives...in other words if you have 3 drives, instead of writing 1 meg to one drive, you write 333k to all 3 drives at once..hence it is faster. The catch is that if you lose ANY of the drives..youve lost all the data. It is generally for gaming systems, video editing and non critical data. Simple to implement.

RAID 1 is "mirroring"...when you have the same data written to two drives at once..so one works as a backup and you can lose one drive and still have the data. The speed is about the same as a regular one drive setup...of course if you have two 40g drives in RAID 1 setup, you still only have 40g of storage.

RAID 5 is popular for servers. It takes at least 3 drives to make a RAID 5 setup. What you have is an ECC error correction code produced and that code is spread out among the disks...so if you lose any one disk you can still recover although the performance will be a little slower in the meantime. Fast read time. Complex.

Those are the popular RAID types. Of course there are many other RAID types but some seem to be more or less only theoretical in nature because they just arent practical to use. RAID 3 used to be popular in servers but RAID 5 dominates now.

Usually a consumer type motherboard comes with RAID 0,1,and maybe 0+1 which is a combination of 0 and 1 and takes 4 drives to build.

JP

[sao95]

thanks

[miguetoo]

i'd like this topic to go further.. since the title itself is "what is raid'.. i have a question about raid..

i'd like to have a raid mobo but i'm not sure if i do have it, it will suit my needs..

i want to set up raid to have 4 HDDs as regular drives on my computer.. is that possible..? for instance, i have 4 '80' gig HDDs and i want them all to store my files as it would when as normal drives (C:, D:, E:, F.. which setup is right to have the hard drives this way..?

[vass0922]

You don't need RAID for that setup

Just set up each one as a different partition.

If you wanted all 4 of them grouped together into one GigantoDrive then yes RAID would be great for you.


Or if you're saying you want to RAID the drives together and still have 4 partitions yes you can do that. RAID 0 will give you that with minimal loss of overhead.
WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If ONE drives dies in this setup ALL YOUR DATA GOES BYE BYE

Why do you want RAID? What are you expecting of it?

[soulja]

i thought u meant the stray lol

[miguetoo]

Originally posted by vass0922
You don't need RAID for that setup

Just set up each one as a different partition.

If you wanted all 4 of them grouped together into one GigantoDrive then yes RAID would be great for you.

...

Why do you want RAID? What are you expecting of it?

if i set up each one in its separate partition without a RAID mobo, i'd be using all four ends of the IDE cables.. i need space for a burner or two.. so in normal mobos without RAID, i'd use primary and secondary master as HDDs, and primary & secondary slaves as CD drives.. i wouldn't have room for the extra 2 HDDs to store..

i'd like to set up RAID to have 4 partitions from 4 HDDs.. i'm planning to store my mp3 collection and files in these extra HDDs.. and i'm not sure which setup this is categorized in..

what do you think..? i'm open to better solutions on setups..

[Uncle Bob]

There are PCI cards that will allow you to add as many as 4 more
IDE devises. You can also get PCI cards that will let you run raid on a non raid MOBO.

[MatrixmaN]

I had a RAID once, but then the cops came and took it away.