RAID? Anyone use it?

[Keebler Elf]

Does anyone here use the RAID functionality of SATA drives? From my limited understanding, it writes the data to two separate drives as an added security.

(Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; wouldn't be the first time! )

 

[ThePunkPanther]

RAID RAID RAID!!! kills bugs dead?

yes. LOTS. most of my systems are using hardware RAID-5 controllers. [you can have a disk unit fail completely and the filesystem [logical disk] remains operational.

quick reference:
raid-0 [striped accross multiple disks, good performance, no redundancy]
raid-1 [mirroring, fast reads, normal writes, total redundancy]
raid-5 [rotating/distributed errorcorrection etc. good balance of speed and capacity].

given that you can now get 500gig disks for not alot of money, they present a very large "egg basket' and hence if a disk fails, thats 500gigs gone if there is no redundancy.

I've been doing this for 25 years and I'm astonished at how cheap disk storage has gotten lately. [college street prices for 250gig disks average about $90/ea].

if you have hardware RAID-mirroring, GO FOR IT. you will be happy when one of the disks fails and the otherone keeps going thus preserving your data. [which is the point of the exercise, right?]

have fun.
ps: there is NO excuse not to have good backups. RAID is not a replacement for a backup system.

 

[Garrett]

Most home users go Raid 0 and I think it is a mistake. If one drive fails, you are toast, and the benefits are very application and controller dependent. I think you are better off with distinct drives for OS, data, and paging. Raid 5 is a whole different story.

 

[Joxxer]

It depends on your needs

If you have a simple system (e.g. one hard drive and a spare), Raid 1 is a reasonable approach. It dupes the data onto both disks and will protect you if one drive crashes. It will not save you from viruses, Windows bugs, etc.

For systems needing a lot of storage, Raid 5 is the best. If you have N drives, you end up with the storage of N-1. For example, I have some boxes with 8x320G drives so I end up with ~2280G (of 2560) and can continue without data loss if any of the 8 drives go bad.

You will need either an OS like Win2K server (or newer variants) for software Radi 5 OR a hardware Raid 5 card OR one of the new Nvidia motherboards with built-in Raid 5.

BTW, it also works for IDE drives.

 

[canucklehead]

i use hardware SAN solutions all the time at work....but my desktop at home is software RAIDed and works great and gives me a piece of mind if my backup fails in anyway.... i usually sync my laptop home directory to the desktop and back up my XRAID and desktop to LTO and off to the office and rotated every two weeks.

 

[ThePunkPanther]

good solution

that is a good system. the SAN boxen can be had on college st. for about $100 and the 750gig disks are relatively cheap. [about $500]. syncing multiple systems to backups and to eachother is good.

i remember back in the 80s [when the world was normal] a network server [novell netware] was about $30k and provided most of the functionality of current SAN/NAS systems.

i use hardware SAN solutions all the time at work....but my desktop at home is software RAIDed and works great and gives me a piece of mind if my backup fails in anyway.... i usually sync my laptop home directory to the desktop and back up my XRAID and desktop to LTO and off to the office and rotated every two weeks.