OT: Raid

[Divide]

My fucking raid died when I was about to fucking shut my computer down and go to bed... that was at about 4am, its 530 or so now, and Im finally getting back on track... DAMN YOU UNSTABLE RAID CONTROLLERS !#!@#!#@!#!@#!@#!@#

[Stigmata]

unlucky divide

Andy

[djskum]

Bit pointless having RAID at home IMHO. I did for a while but was a bit of a waste of time. I'm not serving content or anything and I back important things up. Just something else to go wrong ;-)

DjSKum

[kurai]

If it's one of the Raid 0+1 IDE controllers and you are using it solely for level 1 striping, then they are rarely worth the hassle.

The speed increase gained isn't really worthwhile balanced against the effective halving of the volume MTBF and associated stability issues.

[djskum]

What he said...

Me? I like raid 50...

DjSKum

[Eddie]

Originally posted by kurai
If it's one of the Raid 0+1 IDE controllers and you are using it solely for level 1 striping, then they are rarely worth the hassle.

The speed increase gained isn't really worthwhile balanced against the effective halving of the volume MTBF and associated stability issues.

Isn't RAID 0 _or_ 1 striping?
(0 + 1 is data striping AND mirroring)

I was always under the impression striping would be quite a bit quicker.. is that not the case?
I was planning on getting two smaller HDDs and stripe them, opposed to getting a bigger hard drive....

Eddie

[MayhemMike]

Divide lost me when he said "My"

[\\Fényx//]

Originally posted by MayhemMike
Divide lost me when he said "My"


thats because you said to yourself ''its not yours, its mine'' grabbed his nackerd raid and ran off, thats why he lost you :p thieving bastidos ;)

[death&decay]

Raid 0 (Striping) with 2 drives theoretically doubles the data
transfer. I tried that with 2 IDE disks of the same type and it
went quite well, for about 2 weeks. Then the thing died and I
couldn't restore so I ripped out the raid controller.

I wouldn't advice using raid unless you have a reliable (thus
expensive) controller.


heh

[kurai]

Originally posted by Eddie
Isn't RAID 0 _or_ 1 striping?
(0 + 1 is data striping AND mirroring)

I was always under the impression striping would be quite a bit quicker.. is that not the case?
I was planning on getting two smaller HDDs and stripe them, opposed to getting a bigger hard drive....

Eddie Yeah.

Most of the stuff on consumer level mainboards these days does 0, 1, and 0/1 (simple stripe, simple mirror, mirror + stripe)

Striping *is* a bit quicker (for read operations especially) but you are basically multiplying the overall potential failure rate of the resultant volume by that of every component disk of the set.

(Simple striping means that the entire volume is fucked if you lose *any* drive in the set for whatever reason.)

So ... if you got two small drives instead of one big one, you would have a volume that was faster, but at least twice as likely to fail, and was more expensive overall (in terms of cost per Gb)

[Divide]

Ive done numerous bandwidth tests, and the stripe setup Im using right now runs at 167% as fast as my old setup with a single drive... I can tell a good difference especially now that everything is fresh and clean. My raid was up and going for over a year--- hell almost a year and a half... A year and a half without even reinstalling windows for crying out loud, something was going to happen eventually, unfortunately it caught me completely off-guard so I didnt get to save any of my leet ass screenies of nc

[Archeus]

Sunspots.

[jernau]

I've yet to see an IDE RAID card I trust tbh.

I tried a bunch of them and they all seemed to have problems somewhere. The worst offenders by a long way were the HighPoint ones which somehow always seem to bit-rot your network and kill explorer.exe in worrying ways.

Considering the size and performance of modern HDDs I don't see much use for RAID in a home environment. The only possible exception is mirroring your most important data but DVD backups are very cheap these days.

Performance-wise if you really care that much I'd suggest buying an extra Gb or two or RAM and making a ramdrive. The only time I need that kind of speed though is for handling uncompressed video and I doubt many people ever do that.