What is RAID?!

[fapbuh]

I need to know, everywhere I go there's "RAID CONTROLLERS" "ESCALDE RAID SOMETHING OR OTHER".

Just what does it do? What is it? Is RAID a buzz word like "Cacheflow" and "SuperBIOS", and not to forget "PURam".

It's fake isn't it. I bet it's an inside joke between a few people and their not letting anyone in on it.

RAID

[John Prophet]

RAID is "Redundant array of Inexpensive disks"

It was a way of extending hard drive space etc back when hard drives were very expensive....but nowadays people use RAID setups to give more speed or else to give some form of auto backup by mirroring the hard drive.

RAID has several different "levels" or basically ways of being hooked up...the most poplular ones for home use are RAID 1 and RAID 0.

RAID 1 is for safety....it involves one drive "mirroring" the other drive....in other words whatever is written to one drive is also automatically written to the other drive...so if one drive dies...you still have all your data on the other one.

RAID 0 is for speed.....what it does is take 2 or more drives and write half of the info on one drive and half on the other drive....so if I have 2 megabytes of data what I would be doing is simultaneously writing 1Meg to each drive at the same time....so theoretically it is twice as fast as single drives. BUTTTTTTTTT, of course there is a downside....with RAID o if you lose EITHER drive you lose it ALL, lol. So it isnt used for important data....more just for speed.

Of course there are other RAID levels, like RAID 5 which is the most popular one for servers.

Here are some good diagrams for RAID http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

To use RAID you usually need either a "RAID" motherboard or a RAID PCI controller card. If your motherboard had RAID, that means it has two extra IDE controllers that handle the RAID function....the RAID part has its own little BIOS so it does make booting up slightly slower.

JP

[mlee97]

Don't let these guys kid you, it really means,
Radical - Analog - interuterine - Device
It's used to keep the Microsoft Apps from multiplication.

[thePh@r@oh]

you use it to kill bugs...... jk couldn't resist

[fapbuh]

>< i knew that one was coming Ph@r@oh

anyway, thanks guys, now i know what RAID is. Since It add's $400 to the cost of any system (give or take) I'll do without it. Or I could use it to squish bugs ^_^

[HeadBand]

it dosent add 400 bucks you can get a mobo with raid for 100 easily then just the extra hdd cost...i wouldnt recomend raid 1 for a home system but raid 0 is good

[jmichna]

Originally posted by HeadBand
...i wouldnt recomend raid 1 for a home system but raid 0 is good

Depends... do you want data security (mirroring, RAID-1) or speed (striping, RAID-0)

If the user is more concerned with making sure he doesn't lose tax returns, asst. docs., emails, business docs, etc. than mirroring is the way to go. If the use is a gamer, and doesn't really have much to lose with a HD crash, then RAID-0 is fine.

I'm probably more of the former case, but I've lived with RAID-0 solely because I'd periodically B/U all my important docs, etc. to my wife's PC via LAN. Ultimately, I adeed a third HD, soley for B/U. I ghost the RAID-0 array roughly each week.

Once I do get a crash in that array (and it WILL happen), I'll add two more drives and go RAID 0+1.

[fapbuh]

thanks guys. I know know more, and I know which insecticide to use.