RAID in dumb people terms

[Tuffgong4]

can someone explain in as much detail what raid is

 

[Goatman]

Basically there are two main kinds of RAID

RAID 0 is when you take two hard drives that are exactly the same (size, manufacturer, model number, etc...) and combine them to be 1 big drive

IE. two 30 GB drives would show up at one 60 GB drive in RAID 0. You get improved performance because the RAID Controller Writes half the data to each drive.

RAID 1 is when you take two drives, and it writes whatever you save twice, once on the main drive, and 2nd on the 2nd drive. Used for backup reasons.

 

[GoNz0]

you can use any size/speed drive for raid 0, but the smallest size will be used, ie a 30 and 40gb will use 2x30 to make 60gb so you would lose 10gb of storage doing it that way

 

[leedogg]

For example with raid 0 you save a massive file on the pc, half of it will get saved on one drive the other half on the other so you have 2 drives reading and writing data simultaneously which is why it is faster. However if one of the drives goes down you will lose everything on both drives. Raid 1 is where the massive file is duplicated on both drives, so theoritically if drive 1 fails you can swap in drive 2 and keep going.

 

[LeeJend]

Now the bad news. Both RAID 0 and 1 have disadvantages:

RAID 0 - As stated above if one drive craps out everything is lost. Spilitting data across 2 drives doubles the probability of failure and makes figuring out which one is really bad a pain.

RAID 1 - since the data gets written simultaneously to both drives you get both drives virus infected simultaneously or both drives can get corrupted files written simultaneously or you install bogus drivers on both simultaneously, etc.

Also since both are active you use twice the power and a power supply fialure or electrical spike can trash both drives.

IMHO the above makes RAID worthless. You can get more speed out of them, but at a price.

If you want more HD speed get 1.5 gig of RAM and make a 1 gig HD cache on it.

If you want backup use CD/DVD RW daily (hourly if appropriate) and do a once a week disk image to a HD that is unplugged normally. Make sure you adaware, virus scan and defrag before imaging the program disk.

 

[breezie]

i got two 160gb maxtors on Raid 0, lol--- i dont care if its more risky

 

[Tuffgong4]

that was phenomenal...thank you for the explanation...that was great thanks guys!

 

[Tuffgong4]

one more question is there a RAID 5

 

[Mainframeguy]

hmmMM

that was phenomenal...thank you for the explanation...that was great thanks guys!

LOOKEE here

I think you'll find that good for dumb people - you ain't dumb though (stoopid folks think it kills bugs!)

And how come no-one said what RAID stands for? (YET!)

[EDIT] OK it is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks and you can get more info here and that site is also very handy whenever you hit an unfmiliar acronym. [/EDIT]