RAID HELP

[StormXPC]

I need help with setting up raid. I am wanting either a 0 or a 1. But what are the benefits of each and what would be the best one to go with?

I have tried to setup a raid 0 with a 36gb raptor and 120gb caviar (both sata)., but am wondering why it shows the size to be only 76gb? what happens to the other disk space?

 

[bmillerd]

Raid 1 is a mirror, it copies the same information onto two drives, thus if one fails you have the second drive with the exact same information. The sacrifice for this is performance.

Raid 0 is a redundancy array. In Raid 0 the task of writing the information onto the drive will be split up with each drive responsible for a piece of the information. The major drawback to this is that if one of the drives fail and is unrecoverable you are in trouble because you will not have complete information on either drive. The advantage, at least so people say, is that you get a performance boost.

HOWEVER, an article about a month ago (can't remember where) benchmarked two setups, one Raid 0 one without, both using 74gb Raptors (the 10k rpm SATAs from WD) and there was little or no difference. In my opinion Raid 0 is not worth it because of the cost of the second drive. The performance difference is negligible at best and if you want what little gain there is to be had by Raid 0 I would strongly recommend using two of the exact same drives, which will cost you some money.

IMO Raid 0 is not worth the money or the time. Others here may disagree but judging from what I've read and until I see differently in the performance area it seems pointless to me.

 

[imported_bajan]

Originally posted by: bmillerd
Raid 1 is a mirror, it copies the same information onto two drives, thus if one fails you have the second drive with the exact same information. The sacrifice for this is performance.

I wouldn't agree with that. As you can see from my specs below i have 2 of those "Special Edition" WD drvies that they sold about a year and half ago (may be longer). I have run them separately, in RAID 0 and now they're in RAID 1. The performance difference between the three is neglible at best.

RAID 0 is only beneficial when you're in a scenario where the system will be making a very high amount of random reads and writes like a database server serving hundreds of requests/queries, such as this forum.

Originally posted by: bmillerd
IMO Raid 0 is not worth the money or the time. Others here may disagree but judging from what I've read and until I see differently in the performance area it seems pointless to me.

Likewise. Been there, done that, and i'm glad that one of my drives didn't fail while i had them that way.
:-D


I love RAID 1 though. One of my drives actually failed last month. All i had to do was delete the array so that i could remove the dead drive, RMA it and then wait for the new one. That way i was still able to boot the system without the second drive. Once i got the replacement, i just plugged it in, created a new RAID 1 array, mirrored the drive with all of the stuff onto the new drive and WALLA, end of story.

 

[D1gger]

Originally posted by: StormXPC
I have tried to setup a raid 0 with a 36gb raptor and 120gb caviar (both sata)., but am wondering why it shows the size to be only 76gb? what happens to the other disk space?

In a RAID 0 setup, the size of the array becomes twice the size of the smallest drive. The remainder of your 120GB caviar drive will not be seen in the RAID 0 array.

Basically in RAID 0 half of your data is written on drive #1 and the other half is written on drive #2. It is written in alternating blocks and the drives have to be the same size for this to work properly.