What is Raid? and Should I be Using it?

[Ninja]

Lo all, my current setup is as follows..

I have a gigabyte 7vrxp (Ver 2) Motherboard,

and installed devices

120gig Hdd (IDE1 Master)
DVD Reader (IDE1 Slave)

DVD Writer (IDE2 Master)
CD Writer (IDE2 Slave)

My question is that i am getting another 120gig HDD to put in. Im not fussed about getting rid of my Cd Writer to put the HDD in on the IDE Cable if need be, but i know my motherboard had RAID on it.

Although i have never enquired into what it is but i know i could connect my HDD's to the raid channels somehow? lol (i think)

Would it benefit me to setup Raid? and how would i got about it

Any help would be apreciated

Cheers

Ninja

[Soritong]

Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on severs but aren't generally necessary for personal computer.Level 0: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance.
Level 1: Provides disk mirroring.
Level 3: Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance.
Level 5: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance.

[Neo]

Yup, that webopedia is sure a usefull place, eh?

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

:)

[Soritong]

Hell yea. Webopedia is bookmarked, always :)

I knew it was usually for servers, but I didn't wanna just give that useless piece of info. I still don't really understand how to use it correctly, so someone might wanna post that for him.

[richskie]

Most onboard RAID controllers only support RAID 0 & 1. While RAID 0 increases performance it actually doubles the chance of having a catastrophic data loss.

RAID 3 & 5 require a minimum of 3 disks.

[Neo]

Raid 0 does not really double the chances. There is nothing wrong with Raid 0, only thing is that if one hard drive goes bad, then your screwed. As the data is equally spread out on both of the hd's.

[Zac]

raid is more about providing redundancy for servers than for use in the home environment

[Neo]

I disagree with you. Raid serves different purposes. Speed and Redundancy. More and more home users these days use RAID 0 these days as a performance inrease. And some use raid 1 one for back ups.

Its is out of the question to think that it should be only used for servers. Have you looked at some of the newer (2+ years old) mobo's? Alot of them even come with raid built in. Onboard.

[nightheart]

The only real benefit I've ever seen, at least imo is for spped freaks that run 2 10,000 rpm drives and stripe them together to make one. Mostly since you can't get (not yet) a 80 gig 10,000 rpm drive, but you can stripe 2 32's togther to make a 74.

Personally I see that as a waste since I partition my drives into smaller drives anyway. The data back-up is a good idea if you can afford to "waste" one drive, by just having it sit there waiting for the other to die. Now on servers, I'd say this is vital, but with dvd burners so cheap, its easy to image your drive once a month and burn it to a RW.

The best advice for raid I've ever seen is, "if you have to ask what it is, then you don't need it." my 2 cents..........

[richskie]

Raid 0 does not really double the chances. There is nothing wrong with Raid 0, only thing is that if one hard drive goes bad, then your screwed. As the data is equally spread out on both of the hd's.
If the chance of a hard drive failing is say 1 in a 1000 then the chance of one of a pair failing is 2/1000 or twice that of a single disk. With raid 0 the data is spread at the byte level so if either disk goes bad you can wave goodbye to all your data.

I would say that for the average user it's not needed & adds additional complexity & risk. Though I can see it's uses.

[Neo]

I know how the data is spread out. You made is sound like RAID 0 causes the increased risk of hard drive failure. And not the stand alone hard drives failling on their own.

[richskie]

Oh I see what you mean then. I agree that the chance of an individual disk failing won't increase, you would just have twice as many to fail...

[PH/\T B,5TARD]

Just plug the drive into the raid IDE port on the board and use it as a normal drive "JBOD" fashion.
= Just a Bunch Of Drives" http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/J/JBOD.html

JBOD (for "just a bunch of disks," or sometimes "just a bunch of drives") is a derogatory term - the official term is "spanning" - used to refer to a computer's hard disks that haven't been configured according to the RAID (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci214332,00.html) (for "redundant array of independent disks") system to increase fault tolerance and improve data access performance.