Re: RAID array for home

"Dave Wade" <g8mqw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Rp-dnYJ6e6ylBWPbnZ2dnUVZ8sylnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
After a recent drive failure, I want to set up a RAID array at home both
for speed of data access and redundancy. Never set one up before, but
would like to do it in hardware rather than relying on Windows: any
recommendations?

Having spent a couple of evenings trying to sort out an issue with a RAID1
array on a friends machine, can I echo the "don't do it". I don't think
most of the desktop raid cards have the quality of software thats needed
for reliable performance. In addition, I can't see much point unless you
also have a "hot spare" in case a drive fails. If you don't do this, when
a drive fails what do you do? How long are you going to run for in
degraded mode? What about backups? What about performance while
re-building afater a drive has failed.


Well, I have already been saved a lot of hassle with RAID-1, and I find it
very convenient.


For speed *and* redundancy, you would ideally want RAID-5, which involves
3+ drives and an expensive controller. It would be nice if you had loads
of money, but it's normally only used in servers and really high-end
workstations.


RAID-5 perforformance is worse that RAID 0+1. In general these days its
bottom of my list. Even in normal mode the performance is worse than 0+1.
In degraded mode (i.e. when running witrh a failed drive) its write
performance is appalling, and when re-building after replacing a failed
drive you might as well not bother....

Huh? RAID 0+1 is no faster than RAID-0 with two drives, and is most
probably slower on writes. RAID-5 gets faster the more drives you add, like
RAID-0.


I have two WD Raptor hard drives in 'Matrix RAID' which allows you to
have both RAID-0 and RAID-1 partitions on the same pair of drives. I
think this is only available on Intel chipsets.

RAID 0+1 needs four disks and seems wasteful to me.


But it allows the i/o to be spread over twice as many spindles, much
faster than raid 5...

Huh?

ss.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Hows RAID doing?
    ... My take is that redundancy and ... The advantage of using RAID here is that when a disk fails, ... > out hard drives before they fail. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: RAID array for home
    ... for speed of data access and redundancy. ... RAID 1 is duplication, and there should be no speed improvement. ... If one disk fails you ... And this assumes your controller hasn't copied the cr&pped version to the second drive too, or that the power spike didn't take out both drives at the same time. ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: raid controller
    ... In his article he states four major reasons to discourage RAID; ... Without RAID you could do a traditional backup at 8:00 AM and at 8:30 AM ... But It's asking for 'RAID Controller' ... hard drives with drive/s C on both drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Disk partitioning question
    ... A hardware RAID Volume may exist without any RAID Drives on it. ... > This single array will show up as Disk 0 in Windows Disk Manager. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Fresh installing Dell 9100... do I need RAID stuff?
    ... RAID-0 is two drives writing different data at the same time. ... It was stupid to call it a RAID since the data on RAID-0 is not ... RAID-1, Dell will not support it, and if anything happens they will ...
    (alt.sys.pc-clone.dell)