RAID

[Patrick_Lau]

What is RAID?
What is the advantage of using this?
Is it very expensive?
Where can I get information of this?
Thanks!!!

[Stan]

Hi

From http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.

There are number of different RAID levels. The three most common are 0, 3, and 5:

Level 0: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance.
Level 1: Provides disk mirroring.
Level 3: Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance.
Level 5: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance

Advantages:
- more speed (RAID0 and 5)
- redundancy (RAID1 and 5)

Expensive ? not really if you go the Promise way (FastTrack RAID IDE controller, www.promise.com (http://www.promise.com) )

Stan

Another interesting link: http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 12-21-1999).]

[ktwebb]

NT only supports levels 0, 1, and 5. Depending on your definition of expensive it might be. Is to me. Extra Hard drive(s) and a RAID controller to do it well. NT can do it with software but I prefer hardware RAID controllers. Well worth it if you have Network that requires redundancy and/or speed.

[This message has been edited by ktwebb (edited 12-21-1999).]