What is a RAID? I was doing an install of 10.3 on my sawtooth today (it has two internal HDs) and one of the options was to RAID the drives? What is the point? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Should I do it or not? Thanks.
if you aren't going to read the articles, here is a quick summary.
You can stripe the drives together. This means, in your case, both of your drives would act as one big drive. When the computer is writing a 50MB file to disk, half of it is written on one drive, the other half is written on the other. This effectively doubles your speed. However, if a drive fails, you lost half your data with no hope of recovery.
Servers usually mirror the drives. So, when the computer writes a 50MB file to disk, it also simultaneously writes it to the other disk(s) as well. So if a drive fails, the other one kicks in with the same data. You can then replace the dead disk, and the array gets it back up to speed.
Comments
http://www.wlug.org.nz/RAID
Advantages, disadvantages, the works.
You can read about it at http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/...214332,00.html
Basically you can trade storage space for reliability, or reliability for performance with RAID.
You can stripe the drives together. This means, in your case, both of your drives would act as one big drive. When the computer is writing a 50MB file to disk, half of it is written on one drive, the other half is written on the other. This effectively doubles your speed. However, if a drive fails, you lost half your data with no hope of recovery.
Servers usually mirror the drives. So, when the computer writes a 50MB file to disk, it also simultaneously writes it to the other disk(s) as well. So if a drive fails, the other one kicks in with the same data. You can then replace the dead disk, and the array gets it back up to speed.