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To RAID or not to RAID?
Raere
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ok, so I'm getting another 400GB HD to complement the one that I already have (same model). I want to preserve the directory structure of my files, and not have to remember what's on which HD. I know I can put them in RAID 0 to make them one big HD, but I know that if one drive fails, the whole thing goes kaplooie. I also know that Windows has some sort of dynamic volume function or something that basically combines two HD's into one volume. My question is: what's the difference between the two? I want to combine my HD's, but have as little risk of losing the data as possible. Also, do the drives have to be reformatted to be put into RAID 0, or can they stay the way they are? It's going to be a pain to temporarily relocate ~350GB of data if I have to reformat the one that I already have.
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- Gives great speed working with large files, but performance will suffer loading random access files (games, applications, etc) (Talking about RAID 0)
- Hardware RAID > Software RAID... any benifits of RAID are lost in software mode
- You are giving up 400GB. is it worth the cost of this drive to 1/2 the capacity you bought?
- You have no redundancy -- one goes, BOTH drives go
You are better off getting a third drive and doing a raid 5 .. which gives you 800gb, plus a swapable spare if one goes out.
This all depends on what you want to do .. video editing, photoshop work.. or gaming ?
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These don't go together. If you're doing RAID 0 (striping or JBOD - just a bunch of disks) you won't lose any capacity, but you'll lose all the data if a drive dies.
If you do RAID 1 (mirroring) you'll lose half the combined capacity of the disks, but you can survive a drive failure with data intact.
The dynamic volume thing uses "spanning" basically appending one drive onto the end of the other, making them appear to the filesystem as one big drive. Two drives in RAID 0 use "striping" where data is written concurrently to both drives at once (e.g. the first few bytes go to the first drive, the next few to the second drive, but both these actions are performed simultaneously) meaning your RAID 0 array is (theoretically) twice as fast as a single drive.
Neither spanning nor striping are fault tolerant, meaning you'll lose all the data if one drive dies (and bear in mind, even if you've never had a drive fail on you before, by using two you're doubling the chances of it happening). So if you're going to use one or the other, use RAID 0. I'm fairly certain you'll have to reformat though. Either way, back your shit up because you're far, far more likely to lose it if it's stored in a RAID 0 array.
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