Question About RAID

[RadiationBoy]

Hey guys and gals I just had a question about raid. I'm thinking of buying two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 6L040J2 40GB Ultra ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drives and hooking them up in a RAID 0 array, to improve performace.

But I know virtauly nothing about RAID, so I was just wondering how much it would improve my performance. Does it just double the rpm so I would basicly have a 14,400 RPM harddrive?

Thanks

-RadBoy

Bye the way when I say RAID 0 array I'm thinking of the one that uses two harddrives as one and reads and writes to both (but not the same data on each drive). Not sure if thats RAID 0 or not but I think so hehehe

[pcservicetech]

This is striping. It will write the data across the disks, this will improve your performance but not double the rpm's.

Also, if you use different size drives the sum of your striped set will be equall to 2x your smallest drive.

[unicorn]

This is hard to say.
I´ve read different figures from different sources claiming everything between a 30 to 100 procent increase in speed. I guess the practical increase in speed depends on what you are measuring; is it one big file the speed should increase more compared to a situation where you want to read or transfer many small files.
This also can explain different users reactions varying between satisfaction and disappointment.
NB: In general a hardware RAID works more efficient than a software solution.
Also consider using a backup. RAID 0 gives no data redundance and it's hard to restore data from a pair of drives in case something bad happens to one of the drives.

2-cents you know.

[pcservicetech]

With 0 on hardware RAID I was assuming that is what you were using, you should get increase performance because basically data will be written in half the time it would take to write to 1 drive, but there is no redundancy and if one disk fails you are out of luck unless you are doing backups regularly, but that applies to any disk configuration without question.

[Leech]

JBOD is a Good Raid class also - what it does is enbale you to have diff size drives:

Basically the way it works is that you have : say for example two diff size drives, one 20 gig and one 40 gig. What the JBOD wil do then is combine them as one and will see it as 60 gig.

With the other forms of Raid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Stripping mirroring, mirroring and stripping you need to have the same size drives.

JBOD is a good way to do it in my opinion because if one drive should crash you will only lose the data on the drive that dies, where as with Stripping since it only copies in chunks on each disk and has one prog scattered throughout several it would lose all data if one disk dies.

As far as speed It runs the same as any other drive depending on the RPM speed of the drive you get.

So in my opinion JBOD is the way to go

[JacKDynne]

Hey guys,

Look here for an EXCELLENT primer on RAID that has JBOD as well....pics and explanations included....

http://www.finitesystems.com/PRODUCT/raid/raidlevel.htm


This should make it pretty clear Rad....

[RadiationBoy]

wow thanks for the replys, it helped me a lot espcially that link JackDynne thanks again