What do "you" use Raid for?

[mike breck]

I'm curious.

I know a lot of members have got Raid or seem to be thinking about it.

I can see the advantage in mirroring for a server but when I built my latest system a month ago, I decided that I didn't need it.

So if you've got it - what have "you" found to be the practical advantages for your home/office, gaming or whatever.

What do "you" use it for?

What has been it's impact on "your" everyday PC work?

I know the theory - but would like to know how it is being applied by users in the real world.

[Colonel Sanders]

While,I didn't go RAID because I thought ATA 100 would be plenty fast for the price, besides I can probbably get an ad-in RAID card or SCSI card. However, if your only reason for RAID is mirroring files, I agree it is quite useless for me. Since it also allows to speed up you hard drive(writting smaller chunks to multiple drives) then it would probbably be worth the cost for a cheap up-grade when ATA 200 comes out:D.

Logan

[cobra]

I used to run my ABIT kt7 raid in mirrored mode on my home server. Really just because I stored ALL of my data from all of my pc's on there, outlook pst and archives and my documents, as well as mp3's, videos and home movies.
I have recently switched to striping mode, because in video capture I was dropping TOO many frames in high quality capture.
Seems to be working a little better, I just have to back up my stuff to a cdrw more often.

[mike breck]

Hi Cobra,

Is there a perceptable difference in read/write speed when mirroring or striping?

[cobra]

It depends on the hardware. The very expensive, yes a visible difference.
With my onboard ide raid, I can't visibly 'see" a difference, but behind the scenes it works a little faster, since I am not dropping frames in video capture with striping like I did with mirroring.
So to answer your question with a yes or no, YES there is a perceptible difference. In my machine anyway.
If you are not doing any video capture or anything that is "time critical" in writing the data, there is no need for it. IMHO
But if you do want redundancy with mirrored raid, I suggest you give it a try, especially if you have alot of data that is important and don't want to risk losing it, because even new hard drives fail at ANY given moment.
Good luck.

[mike breck]

Thanks for the info.

From what I've been reading here you can also run more hardware due to having the Raid and IDE channels.

[Apache]

I reaserched how I would build 'my' gamer, communicator, desktop Hi-Fi and all around toy/tool. What you see in the sig is what I've come up with for speed & smoothness and most important to me, equality between componets, balance. Nothing totally overwhelming the other, i.e. 1g cpu w/say an mx vcard {a sin IMHO}.

RAID was an important part of this decision, as the slowest part of the system IS the HD performance {It's mechanical}. So the Q became how to increase speed vs. the mighty dollar, my know-how at the time and what I was willing to compromise in a desk top.

I've 4 HD's in RAID 0, all I can say is IT'S GREAT !!! {and very fast}. Nothing I've seen can keep up with this performance in a single drive that wasn't wildly expensive.
In other words, I took the weakest link and made it respectable, the rest just came naturally.

This is my engineering example of july 2000.

[bob]

RAID is for high end performance. For a business it is necessary for redundancy. For home syetems IDE RAID makes "that little disk green/red light" just blink instead of being a mini night light.
It is always a ballance. It makes a real difference.

[Colonel Sanders]

If I hook up 4 15GB HDDs in raid 0, then is my total storage only 15GB or 60GB?

Logan

[bob]

http://www.promise.com/Products/FastTrak100TX4/FastTrak100_TX4_Release.htm

[Great_One]

Raid 0 is striping only. so if you configure all 4 disk as raid 0 set, you have
60GB of disk. also remember that raid 0 provides no fault tolerance, you lose
1 disk out of the 4, you will be reloading from backup. performance wise raid 0
offers the most. if you need fault tolerance, look at other levels of raid,
like raid 0+1, raid 1, or raid 5.