Harware RAID

[JimCotter]

I know that with hardware RAID the disks have to be the same size. BUT do they have to be the same RPM. If one is 7000+rpm and the other is 5000+rpm does it matter? Also can I have a RAID (two disk) setup and another seprate drive all active at the same time. Reson is I now have a expensive 50gig fast drive and I just can't afford another like it but I can afford a couple of 18Gigs to setup a raid system. It would be nice to have all drives available. Can this be done?
Thankx

[bdog]

It will work. Put the two 18 gig drives on the raid card, and put the 50 gigger on your motherboard. For the 5400 vs 7200 rpm it will not be a problem. The raid array will just be as slow as the slowest drive.

[Stan]

Or you can have the 50GB on the RAID controller without being assigned to any RAID arrays...

Stan

[JimCotter]

Thanks guys. I am better informed now. As you can see I am a newbie with RAID. What advantage is there to putting the 50gig on the RAID controller (it's a seagate SCSI BTW)

JimC

[Stan]

Well, it depends on your RAID controller.

If it has on-board cache, it makes sense to have all your HD on it, as they will benefit from the caching capability of the controller, speeding up I/O.

One drawback, if the RAID controller fails, you loose all the HD.

Stan



[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 07-23-2000).]

[JimCotter]

But if my Mbo has a scsi controller build in if the RAID controller fails couldn't I just plug it back into the MBO and be back in business or does the RAID controller do funny stuff (meaning proprietary formatting) to the hard drive. I was thinking of the MYLEX RAID controller BTW

[Stan]

No !

RAID controllers create arrays with several HD. Data is recorded accross the entire array, some bits on disk1, others on disk2, and so on

More info found here (http://www.acnc.com/raid.html)

Stan

[JimCotter]

Ok. That's cleared me up guys. Thankx alot. The link was great.

JimC