hi ya fun stuff..... it depends ...
if you have a nearly full 80GB disks ... it wont matter if you have 1x 80GB or 4x 20GB( stripping ) - i rather worry about 1 large disk failure... than to worry about which of the 4 small disks gonna die ... also makes 4x the mess in power and cables...etc.. if you use raid1 ( mirroring ) .... effective usage is 1/2 of the total raw disk space - not useful if you're using 40gb of data on your 80gb disks - good option if you want to protect up to 40GB of data from disk crashes and want to stay online even if a single disk crashes as was suggested earlier... use raid5 instead.. if 4 disks raid5 ... if any one disk dies.. you can still recover ( effective disk space is 60GB out of 80gb ) if you add a 5th 20GB disks... you still have 80gb out of 100GB of total usable space.... still only protected against one disk failure but any of the 4 or 5 disks could die ... instead of one 80gb disk == if read transfer speed is important.. use raid0 ( stripping ) over raid1 ( mirror ) - you should be able to read data 2x as fast... but writing is a little slower... best best... === === backup data regularly to DIFFERENT systems .. === c ya alvin -- original bios/disk question ... - most BIOS can and does support up to 130GB or so w/o any problems 160GB ata 133 being the tricky disks to play with - most mb cannot boot from hde/hdf/hdg/hdh - so tell lilo to write mbr info to hda and that / is still /dev/hde ... works fine ... On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 09:35:05AM -0400, Ian D. Stewart wrote: ... > > (say, 80 GB hard drive vs. raid tower w/ 4 20 GB hard > > drives) ? > > If you're getting 80G from 4*20G drive, that must be a RAID 0, so > the RAID would give you a nice boost to data transfer rates, but > you'd better keep a current backup because if any one of those 4 > drives goes bad, you'll lose all your data. (OTOH, add a fifth 20G > drive, make it a RAID 5, and you'll have a winner.) > > Side note: Comments on performance assume that each drive is on a > separate IDE channel all by itself. If your 4 20G drives are hda, > hdb, hdc, and hdd, you're going to take a major performance hit. > Unlike SCSI, IDE can't run two drives efficiently on the same > channel. > > -- > When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists > have already won. - reverius > > Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]