From: "Leythos" <
[email protected]>
|
| But we were not talking about more than one drive. And while we're at
| it, using a non-redundant drive to host the real data on is a bad move
| too. Most users only have access to simple methods of online storage -
| like purchasing a simple SATA/IDE RAID controller card and a second
| drive - with minimal effort it can be installed and up and running in
| under 30 minutes.
|
| If you have two drives, not RAID, and use one for the OS and one for
| data, you have the same risk of a fault rendering either drive as a
| loss.
|
| What you gain, talking about partitioning, is that you can setup secure
| areas that would be more difficult on a single partition, you can also
| wipe and reinstall the OS partition without impacting the data
| partition.
|
| If you want redundancy, you need RAID.
||
| We all know that IDE/EIDE is not as performance minded in a multi-
| user/multi-task system, but there are significant advances that come
| very close to rivaling SCSI controllers.
|
| The Promise SX6000 handles onboard CACHE, also has it's own controller
| to off-load CPU time, and handles 6 IDE drives in a hot-swappable mode.
| I've got more than a Dozen of these running on servers with 250GB EIDE
| drives attached in a single RAID-5 setup.
|
| There are also some onboard IDE or SATA RAID controllers packaged with
| Motherboards that don't include their own CACHE memory and take CPU
| time, but, they are much more reliable than a soft-raid solution.
|
| So, we're talking two different things here:
|
| Paritioning: 1 drive with 2 areas (OS and DATA) works well since you
| have more options when fixing things and also great for security
|
| Redundancy: RAID - Two or more drives that act as one, so that if one
| fails there is no data loss.
|
| --
|
| (e-mail address removed)
| remove 999 in order to email me
Partitioning effectively only provides separation.
I don't want to get into technical aspects of applying storage solutions. It is outside the
scope of this discussion. However two hard disk is better than one hard disk and cacheing
controlers (unless they have a battery back up) can cause catastrophic data loss and/or data
corruption. Promise constollers in general and the company as a whole SUCKS ! You will
also find that advanced controllers use their own CPU in assymterical multiprocessing
techniques. Older ISA comtrollers used 80186 or 80286 CPUs and many PCI controllers use
80386 CPUs. Like I said, it is out of the csope of the discussion at hand.