Is raid setup much faster.

[gtr]

I have no idea how much better and/or faster. For example how would a ata66 raid compare to a normal ata100? Is it just 66X2 or not exactly?

[Philip1952]

Raid 0 will have two hard drives feeding info at the same time. On my Abit BE6-2 board. With 2 20 gig WD's hooked up in raid.
The transfer rate for one drive before raid was 15 to 18 meg pre second. This was unbuffered speed also. With both drives in raid setup transfer speed was 38 megs per second. I used the program HDTach to give me the transfer rates.
Raid will make for a longer boot time also. The BE6 would boot in 40 seconds without raid. With raid it took 1.5 minutes. but everthing opend faster. Loading programs was real fast. Moveing files was fast also. If you think about useing raid. Put another drive in to save all important data to if you have a power failure dureing a file write it will break a stipe then you will probably loose every thing. I had a 4 gig drive setup as a backup drive for this reason. I stored anything I didn't want to loose. (On line downloads or other date and so on). Or a burner works good also.
As far as the difference between ata 66 to ata 100 you won't tell the difference. It is just a standard for the industry. No single ide drives can deliver this amount of data. Even tho they would like you to belive it.

[This message has been edited by Philip1952 (edited 08-14-2001).]

[Mr.Goodbytes]

I agree completely with Philip. I had a client running a Raid 0 configuration on a promise ata 100 raid card. Against my advice, he chose not to have a third harddrive to back up to. One of his Maxtors took a dump, and he called me up practically in tears and demanded that I recover his data. Well, I had to say the dreaded "I told ya so." Raid 0 is the fastest yet least fault-tolerant configuration you will find. If you are doing video or High resolution image editing, you will greatly benefit from the increased data transfer rate and low cost of raid 0. But as Philip advised, have a backup, or you'll be crying down the road.

[scoots987]

Thanks people, this is a good topic. I just bought a RAID card and intend on using RAID 0.

Does anyone have a backup plan? Meaning, using this RAID what are your methods of backing up? Do you have something to automate this? Or is it just when you find the time and physically copy it over to another HD?

Scoots987

[acid_burn~187]

You could have a raid 1+0, which would cost liek twice as much, but you would have the speed of a raid, while having everything backed up.

P.S. For a good little explanation of RAID setups, see:
http://linas.org/linux/Software-RAID/Software-RAID-2.html

~Paul

[This message has been edited by acid_burn~187 (edited 08-14-2001).]

[Philip1952]

If it was something off the internet. I just sent the download to the back drive. If it was a program I was downloading. I haven't found one yet that doesn't auto install to the C: drive anyway. This drive was on its own channell so I didn't lose much in cpu cycles with it. If it was data I just copy and paste to my back drive. There might be programs to do this but I didn't look for one. Most of my stored items are programs from downloading. I have better than 20 hours of down loaded programs at 56k. I don't want to do them over. Some I can't find any more eather. If you do raid just have a third drive or a burner. It makes for a better piece of mind.

[daveleau]

Hi guys. Great topic, but it should be in the Data Storage area of the forums. I am moving it there now.

Dave
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum18/HTML/000296.html

[This message has been edited by daveleau (edited 08-14-2001).]