Should I get a RAID hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bill.boylan
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bill.boylan

I'm buying a new computer with Vista installed. One of the options I can
specify is a "DataSafe" hard drive which is really three hard drives: two
drives for the RAID 0 and one drive to backup the whole thing. I'm getting
cold feet on this. If anybody reading this has had RAID experience, please
give me some advice. Would I be happy with the RAID or am I just asking for
trouble?

Bill Boylan
 
I have used Raid on four machines now, 2-ABit NF7-s and 2 Asus
M2N32-SLI deluxe motherboards with Maxtor and Samsung hard drives.
They have worked flawlessly. I used stripping for speed and mirroring
for security and you can really tell the difference in speed between
those systems. I guess the best solution is fours hard drives using
stripping and mirroring but then you are getting into very serious
systems and you still need to make backups - lets face it, if you
accidentally delete a file it is gone from the system even if it was
mirrored.

Raid works but you may be just as happy with one big Sata II drive. I
bought 2 80 GB Sata II drives on sale for about $43 and they work
great set up as raid 0 - 149 fast GBs. :-)

Ak
 
bill.boylan said:
I'm buying a new computer with Vista installed. One of the options I can
specify is a "DataSafe" hard drive which is really three hard drives: two
drives for the RAID 0 and one drive to backup the whole thing. I'm getting
cold feet on this. If anybody reading this has had RAID experience, please
give me some advice. Would I be happy with the RAID or am I just asking
for trouble?
Click to expand...

What do you need? Are you looking for performance or resilience?

Here is a brief summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_RAID_levels

I asked myself the same question recently. I wanted decent performance but
not at increased risk. In the end, I just bought a Smasung HD501LJ drive.
It's cheap, it's quiet, and in Custom PCs recent tests it all but matched
the WD Raptor 150, and I back it up regularly to other disks too.

I'm definitely in the power user bracket; but this drive on it's own is more
than fast enough. If I make regular backups, I have resilience. If my disk
failed now, I'd obviously lose any work up until my last backup, but in my
case that is not an issue.

The solution that has been offered to you sounds reasonable. Raid 0 will
give you a slight performance improvement (but it's often over-rated), and
you will be able to back the volume up to the 3rd disk. I'd just question
whether the Raid 0 is worth the theoretical risk. If you have two slow
drives you'll probably find it is outperformed by the faster 7200 SATA II
drives anyway.

CJM
 
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