Cheap Raid 0+1 Possibilty

[Ehermansen]

OK - I'm a NOOB to this raid stuff but my newest PC has two 200GB drives. How does onse set up a RAID system? Is it built into XP? Special software/hardware required? Etc.

 

[notgrey]

thnx op. just decided to get the penguin external case from newegg. this should work well in it.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: Ehermansen
OK - I'm a NOOB to this raid stuff but my newest PC has two 200GB drives. How does onse set up a RAID system? Is it built into XP? Special software/hardware required? Etc.

To run RAID that's actually worth anything, you need hardware raid. The difference is when your system goes down or has issues related to power, the hardware raid actually has a battery pack that will dump its cache to the disk in the event of a failure. You can do software raid and there are many solutions for that, but you don't get true redundancy because of what you could lose in the cache....it's definitely better than not having anything though...

 

[dman]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi

Originally posted by: Ehermansen
OK - I'm a NOOB to this raid stuff but my newest PC has two 200GB drives. How does onse set up a RAID system? Is it built into XP? Special software/hardware required? Etc.

To run RAID that's actually worth anything, you need hardware raid. The difference is when your system goes down or has issues related to power, the hardware raid actually has a battery pack that will dump its cache to the disk in the event of a failure. You can do software raid and there are many solutions for that, but you don't get true redundancy because of what you could lose in the cache....it's definitely better than not having anything though...

Not all hardware raid has battery backed cache (although it's probably fairly common). I'd define it as the hardware device manages/controlls access to the raid array as a logical drive vs having the OS perform that work. Technically there's software (firmware) in the hardware devices to do that work... but the point is in a hardware array there's a device/coprocessor to manage that overhead vs having it done in the OS layer via the main cpu.

 

[robsdeals]

How about this Hitachi 160GB 0A31637 SATAII U300 7200rpm 8MB Hard Drive for $ 65.92

Has any purchased from here

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: robsdeals
How about this Hitachi 160GB 0A31637 SATAII U300 7200rpm 8MB Hard Drive for $ 65.92

Has any purchased from here

I may just have to bite on this deal

Originally posted by: dabuddha
More than 50 cents a gig is way overpriced these days :/

there is something called a budget, try to think outside your own secluded shell.

 

[BlackPear1]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles

Originally posted by: dabuddha
More than 50 cents a gig is way overpriced these days :/

there is something called a budget, try to think outside your own secluded shell.

I'm confused, are you saying that more than .50/GB is a good price?

 

[tinkakat]

i think ok op

 

[13Gigatons]

Bloody hell enough with the 7200 rpm drives, they need to start putting out more 10,000 rpm drives.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: BlackPear1

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles

Originally posted by: dabuddha
More than 50 cents a gig is way overpriced these days :/

there is something called a budget, try to think outside your own secluded shell.

I'm confused, are you saying that more than .50/GB is a good price?

Its pretty simple, if you have only $300 to spend on your parts, and you've budgeted your money with specific amounts to spend on parts, and you simply can't spend more than $50 on your hard drive, then what are you going to do? If you don't really need more than 80GB, and you can't/don't want to mess with rebates, then you simply don't have much of a choice do you?

Take milk for example. A gallon might cost you $3; a quart might go for $1. Obviously the gallon is the better deal as you'd have to pay $4 to get 4 quarts to make a gallon. However if your budget only allows you to spend $1 for milk, and you really don't need the gallon, then you're actually saving $2 so you can buy your eggs and cheese and have your omelet.

This issue is also reinforced with the idea of RAID, where you need multiple hard drives (identical ones tend to help). Rebate deals usually restrict you to 1 hard drive, good luck getting multiple ones on the same deal, just more hassle and waiting and maybe you can?t even afford to do it in the first place ? if you can only pay $100 upfront, what are you going to do if the drives are going to cost you $200 before rebates?

 

[BlackPear1]

OK