RAID question

[Squeetard]

To answer your question. Raid 1 is no slower than no raid at all.

[MpG]

RAID 1 is pretty much identical to a single drive, with the main drawback being that you're using 2 drives, but only getting one drive's worth of capacity. RAID 0 on the other hand, is pretty highly overrated outside of certain applications (A/V, large file handling, etc). Personally, I'm not sure I've seen anything happen 75% faster on my own system.

[LCB001]

While not as fast as Raid 0, Raid 1 is faster than a single drive in most cases due to being able to read/write to both drives at the same time. MaximumPC explains here RAID Done Right | Maximum PC

[MpG]

I've heard about that, but do onboard solutions do that? I tried RAID 1 at one point on an ICH9R-equipped motherboard, and there was definitely no improvement in HDD performance.

[miggs78]

That explains a whole lot by Maximum PC. Thanks LCB for the link. RAID 1 is more of a waste of time, only reason to actually do a RAID leaving speed aside is you want double the capacity of the drives, if you just don't get that with RAID1, its not even worth looking at it.

Raid 0+1 however seems interesting, however at the moment I can only invest in 2 drives, I will have to leave that out. RAID 5, only works with a controller which costs an arm and a leg.

The best solution I see here is RAID0 for a raid setup. Talking about backup, is it possible to use a ghosting software to make a ghost on a RAID setup ?. If that possible life can be easy, I have a version of norton ghost 10.0, but i'm sure there must be at least on freeware that is an alternative to norton.

Thanks for the help so far.

[NyteOwl]

The only reason to do RAID is to provide fault tolerance in case of drive failure. RAID ) is not truly RAID (Redundant Array of Independant/Inexpensive Disks) at all as there is no redundancy and the performance gains are moderate at best while doubling the risk of drive failure. If you need higher drive speeds, you use faster drives and/or a wider bus.

To be technical, RAID 10 is not a RAID 0 array mirrored, it's a RAID 1 array striped.

The difference may seem minor, but it is significant when it comes to fault tolerance. The fact that the array is in RAID 1 first provides the necessary redundancy for fault tolerance, while striping the mirror improves performance somewhat. This permits up to half the array to fail without data loss while striping first and mirroring later (0+1) only has the single drive failure tolerance of RAID 1.

[miggs78]

I agree but RAID 10 can only be done with 4 hard drives minimum, and as I mentioned I can only afford 2 for now.

[Tazer-[X]]

Personally, im running RAID lvl 5. ANd being an old net admin, and all around old school tech junkie, Ill tell you right now, if you got the money to burn, get an adapted raid 5 sata 2 66 MHZ pcix card. Or, for the real deal, invest in some REAL hardware and get a 29160 scsi card and some 15k CHeetahs! Prolly wouldnt need raid with a scsi solution coz they quality and longevity of a decent scsi subsystem smokes ANY IDE variant.
Oh, and technically its not RAID Lvl 10, its really called RAID lvl 0 + 1 , or 1 + 0, which is the same as 0 + 1. But, just remembered, Backup Exec, many types of tape back ups, or, heck! get a blu ray burner and do a back up when your drives start to make a clikcing noise!:P