Raid

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ian

I have a motherboard with raid on it. I only have one hard
drive so can raid be used with one hard drive and further
more what is this raid meant to do.
 
You can set up your machine with 1 drive on the RAID
controller. The RAID controller will recognize the drive
and use it normally. I ran my machine like this for about
a year with no issues. It can be handy if you are
planning on using more than 4 IDE devices. It lets you
have your primary HDD on the RAID and then 4
optical/zip/HDD/etc drives on the IDE controller. I found
that the RAID boot time nearly doubled my system Boot
Time. I was running mine that way because of cabling
issues (HDD down low and optical up high is a full tower)

part II

RAID 101, the cliff notes version.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives or
Redundant Array of Independent Drives.
RAID has 2 basic settings that do different things.
RAID-0, also called striping, sets up 2 or more HDD so
that the PC sees them as 1 big drive. The machine writes
data across all of the drives in stripes. This boosts
performance because you reduce seek times. Were in a
single drive the drive head has to sweep back and forth
across the platters getting data, the striped array lets
one send data while the next looks and then sends data.
This sends the data out in a more continuous stream. The
down side being that if you loose one drive in the array,
the whole array is lost.
RAID-1, also called mirroring, takes 2 drives and writes
the same data to both at the same time. This gives you
backs up incase of the physical failure of one drive. The
down side being that you get the same amount of storage
for twice the price.
The other way RAID can be set up is RAID-1+0 or RAID-0+1,
where you take 4 or more drives and set up a striped array
and them mirror it to another set of identical drives.

Power users usually set up a RAID-0 so that they can get a
few more points in benchmarks. If you have critical data,
RAID-1 gives you protection from a physical failure of a
drive (but it offers no extra protection from other forms
of data loss or corruption such as a virus or Windows
SNAFU)

Personally I would avoid using RAID except as a 5th IDE
plug. I am re-cabling my system to run my HDD off of the
main IDE and am disabling the RAID controller. The change
in boot time is phenomenal.
 
Hi,
RAID= Random ARRAY (ensemble=more than one) of Independant Disks.
The name describes the functions and demands.

Very down to earth description ( not the most accurate but an "intro").
Raid "couples" a minimum of 2 disks or pairs of disks in different
agencements to (your choice) either increase
a) speed or
b) reliability, security...
....depending on the type of setup ( basically 4 of them) you select.

2 disks:
======
1 and 2 for speed==> split the files and synch them, faster tha a normal
EIDE setup.

1 and 2 for "doubling" the files on each=security, just about the same
speedwise as a normal EIDE setup.

4 disks:
======
1 and 2 split for speed plus 3 and 4 (same) for screaming speed also
==Fastest but the least secure as no doubling anywhere of the infos.

1 and 2 split for speed while
3 and 4 get duplicate of the infos on 1 and 2=fast but not screaming fast,
more secure than just above. Info duplicated.

Finally:
1 and 2= doubling of 1/2 of the overall infos WHILE
3 and 4= get to double the other half.

Summary: The fastest array is the least secure: one of the disk goes
then....
The slowest, the most.
 
Hi,
RAID= Random ARRAY (ensemble=more than one) of Independant Disks.
The name describes the functions and demands.
Click to expand...

Wrong. RAID = Redundant Array of Independant (used to be Inexpensive)
Disks.
Very down to earth description ( not the most accurate but an
"intro"). Raid "couples" a minimum of 2 disks or pairs of disks in
different agencements to (your choice) either increase
a) speed or
b) reliability, security...
...depending on the type of setup ( basically 4 of them) you select.

2 disks:
======
1 and 2 for speed==> split the files and synch them, faster tha a
normal EIDE setup.

1 and 2 for "doubling" the files on each=security, just about the same
speedwise as a normal EIDE setup.

4 disks:
======
1 and 2 split for speed plus 3 and 4 (same) for screaming speed also
==Fastest but the least secure as no doubling anywhere of the infos.

1 and 2 split for speed while
3 and 4 get duplicate of the infos on 1 and 2=fast but not screaming
fast, more secure than just above. Info duplicated.

Finally:
1 and 2= doubling of 1/2 of the overall infos WHILE
3 and 4= get to double the other half.

Summary: The fastest array is the least secure: one of the disk goes
then....
The slowest, the most.
Click to expand...

Not even close. Try www.sohoconsult.ch/raid/raid.html for a far more
accurate description.
 
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