I'm totally new to raid. Is the mirror drive visible in My Computer? Mine isn't.

mine isn't

a mirror raid will make two eighty gigabyte hard drives look like one 80 gigabyte hard drive.
A stripe raid will make two 80 gigbyte hard drives look like a single 160 gigabyte hard drive.

Hope that explains it simply enough.

Thanks kam, I kind of guessed that. I was mainly wondering if I should see 2 drives in "My Computer" instead of one. And mine is mirrored.

Also, is there a drastic performance difference between stripe and mirrored? I'm under the impression stripe is much faster.

mine are mirrored for protection
I have hear about an increase in speed but not
that it was noticeable for the average user
wase's could be striped

yes, mine is striped Al...much better performance over mirrored..
and, since I know you back up regularly, and have recent drive images available, you would be better to use this config insted of mirroring...

simple explanation is here... explanation is about linux/redhat systems, but it applies to windows based systems also..

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/R...aid-levels.html

Well I was Mike.....kinda.

I just backed the important stuff on another drive. But with striping that can't be done. So I guess I'll need to start doing drive images, Thank God I have a DVD burner. :D

Striping just spreads the data over two drives equally, so half goes on one drive and other half on the other drive (assuming you are only using 2 drives for the stripe). Problems with striping is that If one drive fails, you are kind of screwed unless you are using a stripe with parity drive system. With that method, the parity drive can be used to recover files.

The mirror system is nice because every file is duplicated on both drives, so if one fails, you have a complete recent backup on the second drive. Disadvantage of the mirroring system is that well you can only use half of your storage space. You have two 80GB drives, with the mirror system, you can only use 80gb of that, while if you use the stripe config, you have the full 160gb.

Its a toss up on which config you want to do, there are other configs too, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. With only two drives, your possibilities are a little narrowed, but the true power of raid comes in with servers with lots of hard drives :D

On a small personal note, my roommate had a stripe config setup and then one of his hard drives failed and we tried and tried and tried to recover ANYTHING from it, and we were unsucessful. I am staying away from raid for right now until i get a huge mass of hard drives :D But that is just my personal beef.

I have one IDE for backups and RAID 1 (partioned in two and mirrored).
The mirroring protects you only if one of the two SATA drives crashes -
it doesn't prevent you from screwing up (sorry for technical term) your system. Alas, the garbage you put on one disk is instantaneously mirrored on the other.

Hey Al;

go out and buy a cheapo USB ext hd, and back up an image to it once a week or twice a month..I have been doing that for a while now, and I can restore my 50 gig image in about 3 hours.. sometimes I do it every couple of weeks, especially if my config gets weird after installing something..

Use Acronic True Image; version 7 works better than version 8..
PM me if you need it..very simple and works with all RAID configs; Norton Ghost has been iffy with RAID backups..

wase4711