Hey Ron -
Thanks for your response.
However, my question has nothing to do with striping. I tried striping long
ago and like you say, I found it to be too dangerous.
My question here is this:
Will I take a performance hit by going raid (mirroring) using two drives vs.
just no raid at all with one drive. In other words, when the raid controller
splits the data to write to two devices instead of one, is there a
performance hit?
Thanks!
Scott

"Ron" wrote in message
news Hmm. Well, yes, sortof.

I say "sortof" because if you haven't run for awhile on a RAID0/striped
array...THEN switched to RAID1...you won't have a point of reference against
which to compare the performance [decrease] of a mirrored array.

Is a striped array faster than a mirrored array? Absolutely. But as you
already know, the latter is safer.

That said - and I know there are those that disagree - my counsel would be
to go with the RAID0. The likelihood of a failure on one out of two drives
which are in a RAID1 array is still pretty slim. And if the failure of one
of those two drives ends up taking 2 years...then you will have lost out on
the significant performance boost offered by a striped array for 2 years. A
bit like buying insurance, eh? You just pay your price; just in case.
Except in THIS case, a failure means a bit of time to re-install software,
not a loss of life. Besides, if you set up a striped array, you can always
maintain a clone of the array on a separate drive in the system!

Please post a follow-up.
Ron