raid - final leat expensive config confirm

  • Thread starter Thread starter greg
  • Start date Start date
G

greg

Bob

thanks a lot
it is incredible i spent an hour with dell chat support and they know
NOTHING
I mean is this question really that exotic
And to Adaptec is is impossible to get thru
and their web site asks to download JVM before sending simple question!!!!!


the overall price tag 160!!!!

On ebuyer.com

ADAPTEC ATA RAID 1200A PCI Card RAID 0,1 - $52

Seagate Barracuda 7200 80GB Hard Drive-ata/100 8.5ms - 54*2 = $108

Bob final question: so all the power and info those hard drives will get
from those
80 cables?

I mean this is not IDE so that cable (for two drives I have now ) I will not
touch right?
 
The power to the drives comes thru the little 4 conductor plugs from the
power supply, the data goes thru the 40 pin-80conductor IDE cable from
the card. The original IDE drives and conductors are not part of the
RAID system and continue to be used as before. You may wish to browe
www.google.com for IDE RAID and read up on how simple it really is.
 
Greg,

Just before you get in deep with this, there are a few important things to
note about RAID 1:
* RAID 1 is no substitute for having backups - it protects against single
drive failures in common scenarios, it does *not* protect against user
error, software error, catastrophic system error, controller error, power
failure and so on.
* Monitor your RAID 1 System. Everyday check to see if both drives in the
RAID are OK. The adaptec RAID controller doesn't shout quite as loud as
others when there is a drive failure, unless you configure alerts with it
(even then I am not too sure if you can on the lower cost controllers).

If you keep the above things in mind then you will have a more reliable
system. If you ignore a drive failure or just don't notice it because it did
not popup and hit you in the head, then you are back to No RAID and
potential system loss.

RAID drives do fail. It does happen that more than 1 drive can fail in quick
succession so if / when a drive fails, it should be fixed promptly.

I am not trying to scare you, it is just that I have seen several RAID
systems that were useless due to failed drives and were highly vulnerable
due to inadequate backups.

It is well worth the effort when setting up a RAID system to learn what
happens and how you find out what to do when a drive fails. If you can,
configure a RAID 1 volume (don't do anything else with it at all other than
maybe formating it in Windows and assigning a drive letter maybe put a copy
of some throw away data on it), then shutdown, power off, pull out the power
and interface cable to one of the drives and restart. See what happens when
you restart - how do you know that you know have a Broken RAID? Shutdown,
power off, plug the drive back in and restart - what happens? How do you fix
it? If you learn this now, you will not panick so much when a drive actually
fails later.

HTH
- Tim
 
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