RAID Question...

[KlumpDud]

What's a RAID? Does it greatly increase performance? Should I get one? How much are they?

[HAL9000]

Your guide to RAID. (http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/296/)

[Force Flow]

Lol, haven't seen a RAID question in a while... :p

Performance increase? Not really. You wold only see it in video editing, if that.

As for actually getting it, you can get it built onto the motherboard or as a seperate PCI card.

[KlumpDud]

No performance increase, not even with stripping? Notice that I have 2 HD's on one IDE

This is from the article that HAL posted
People who are into raw speed for gaming, multimedia, etc, will enjoy RAID 0.

and:
Popping a cheap RAID controller into a system and putting those drives to use could really improve your system's performance.

[HAL9000]

Striping gives you the capacity of the drives combined plus an increase in speed, but nothing for redundancy meaning if you corrupt or lose data on one drive, you take the whole array down. Personally, I don't trust IDE RAID as I have always found it buggy. If one really wants RAID, spend the bucks on SCSI.

[KlumpDud]

I see...

Not that I don't value your opinion Hal, but does anyone else have anything to say about RAID?

[fatboyjim]

David Risley has plenty to say about it in the link in the first reply to your post, KlumpDud

Sorry if this is bringing it back from the dead a little. It's just I was searching for RAID info today and found drisley's article very understandable

Cheers

Jim

[Floppyman]

Originally posted by HAL9000
Striping gives you the capacity of the drives combined plus an increase in speed, but nothing for redundancy meaning if you corrupt or lose data on one drive, you take the whole array down. Personally, I don't trust IDE RAID as I have always found it buggy. If one really wants RAID, spend the bucks on SCSI.

Ditto. I once had an IDE RAID setup that proved to be nothing but trouble. The only RAID I will use is SCSI based.

[Blakhart]

The software raid setups are doomed to failure, far as I am concerned. This is most of the ide raid cards. Hardware raid is another thing entirely. The convention is this; have a single fast drive for boot (os and certain utes, plus swapfile), and then raid the apps that you want to be fast.
A 15k rpm scsi boot drive, usualy 9gigs or so, followed by 4 15k rpm 18 or 36gig (and even larger, for the well to do) drives in raid is very common in raid systems. Well, at least some systems used for games/vid edit. They also often use a fat ide drive, even if it is only 5400rpm, for data and backups.
Scsi hardware raid cards are very expensive, as are 15k drives.
It all matters little in the grand scheme of things, raid is fun for bragging rights, and good for those who must have fast data.
Single ide drives will do everything you need, for the most part.
Me, I will take scsi, thanks.