mulitiple hard drives

[AQR8]

I remember reading about chaining small hard drives instead of a large hard drive. Any info would be great

[BEOR999]

Do you mean SCSI or creating Logical Drives on a partition ?

[hd581]

Here's a link to something called RAID:
http://anandtech.com/html/articledisplay.cfm?document=913&pagenum=2

In sum, it's a method of connecting 2 or more hard drives together that all act as 1 big one. The main advantages are:

- speed, the hard drives split a file in 2 and both store half of it (ie, striping). *Ideally* this should take half the time.

- fault tolerance, it can store information redundantly so in case one of the hard drives fails, the other has a copy or can recreate the data (ie, mirroring/parity).

Anandtech also posts benchmarks of a RAID system pitted against equivalent hard drives in a non-RAID. As you can see the speed advantage is best for specific applications. The big deal about RAID is really its fault tolerance. Companies that can't afford server downtime are willing to pay the $$$ that a RAID system costs (mirroring is the safest, but cuts your hard drive space in half).

If it's speed you want here's what you need: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/prod/us36lzx72zx.htm

If this has nothing to do with what you're asking, have a nice day http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif.

[izzzy12k]

I heard that if you have Windows NT you could span a logical drive (C: or D: or whatever) or multiple drives.

hope this helps

izzzy12k

[[Neo770]]

Check out
www.promise.com (http://www.promise.com)

their FastTrak sound like what you want.

I'm using one with 2 samsung 8.4gig drives in raid mode 2+0 stripe and it rocks.

Average data rate of about 15meg sec.

[hd581]

Hey Neo770, have you run a Winbench99 on those? If so what was your Business Disk, High End Disk, and Synthetic Performance Comparison? I was considering IDE RAID for my next system.

Also, what's RAID 2+0? Striping w/ some sort of parity checking?

[This message has been edited by hd581 (edited 01-21-2000).]

[Stan]

Hey Neo770 !

I am using the FastTrack RAID controller with 4 IBM 22Gxp (7200rpm, 2Mb cache).
NT loads really fast...

hd581: buy that controller, it's really worth it !
I am not sure what 2+0 means but this is the way I understand it.
The controller is a RAID 0 and/or 1. In my case, it displays 4+0 and I think it means that I have 4 disks in RAID0 and none in RAID1 (mirror).

The good think about that controller is that you can have up 2 of these in your PC and have an array of 8 HD !!! Imagine 8 HD in RAID0... waow...

Stan

[Stan]

Yep, I think that's the way the controller displays the HD info.
At work, I have set up a PC with 4 HD in RAID0/1. The controller displays it as a 2+2 array... make sense to me...

Stan