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With consumer-type RAID controllers, there are usually two things you can
do, mirroring and striping. For both, you need at least two different hard
drives. Mirroring (RAID level 1) is a faul-tolerance configuration. The
RAID controller writes all your data to two different drives. They are
mirrors of each other. If one fails, the other takes over and your data and
uptime are preserved. Mirroring can also improve read performance of your
drives because data can be read from both drives at the same time. The
disadvantage is that you "lose" half your HDD space because you can only
store as much data as the capacity of one drive.
Striping (RAID level 0) is designed to improve disk performance. Both your
HDDs (or more if you have them) are combined into what appears to be a
single drive. When data is written or read, the controller can access both
drives at once, so both read and write performance are improved. The
disadvatage is that the configuration is not fault-tolerant and it may be
impossible to acces the data from either of your two drives if one fails.
Often, you can set up an array as RAID 0+1, which offers all the benefits of
both mirroring and striping. For this, though, you need four HDDs and you
still "lose" half your space. The other general disadvantage of IDE RAID is
that with some RAID controllers, it tends to demand more CPU time than
regular ATA controllers.
There are now newer IDE RAID products that offer more advanced RAID
implementations like RAID level 5, which offers fault-tolerance and improved
performance without so much "lost" space. But as far as I know, these newer
controllers have not yet been implemented onboard a motherboard.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Garvin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Multiple recipients of The_Screwdriver_List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2001 11:26 PM
Subject: From The Screwdriver List: To RAID or not to RAID?
>
> I recently bought a new Abit board at a computer show and the guy tried to
> talk me into spending 30 bucks more on the RAID version. I decided against
> it but now I'm wondering what RAID could do. It has something to do with
> mirroring the hard drive, I know that, but would it help to have it on my
> home PC?
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