In article , Bucky
wrote:

Paul, how likely can a striped RAID break, and what about just going
0+1. I know nothing about RAID really, having never used it. I have
only used SCSI non RAID. I wanted to put Windows on the RAID for
maximum speed, as my thinking was that speeding up Windows hard drive
accesses would speed up my system considerably.

For a simple two disk stripe, if either of the two drives fails,
your data is toast. So, that is double the risk of a failure.
Now, if you think your disks are truly of heroic quality, go right
ahead and stripe the boot disk.

A 0+1 will certainly fix most simple media failures (but not
the "burned by the PSU" type failure). The problem is, most users
do not experiment with the four disks and learn how to handle a
failure, so when the chips are down, they don't know which disk(s)
to grab and replace, and they don't know what buttons in the
interface are safe to click or not (like, is "delete array" a
safe button ?). And the manual is just useless at explaining all
the issues. So, you have four disks in your hands, you know
something is busted, but you are paralyzed with fear when it
comes time to fix it.

I prefer my accidents to be simple ones. Using a single disk for
my computer, the disk either works, or it is toast. Maintenance
is simple - do backups, buy a replacement disk if the current
one breaks. If I want speed, I can buy a single 15K RPM SCSI disk,
with a 90MB/sec data rate.

One thing you might do, is visit a web site like Promise or Highpoint
or the like, and download a manual for a real RAID card. There might
be more background info in a real RAID card manual, then the five
pages you get in a mobo manual.


Paul, could you tell me more about RAID, and/or refer me to a good
site that tells more.

I am thinking that, well, if I put my non critical stuff on a mirrored
array (and yes, I have three UPSs, they just need batteries, but they
work, APC 620 & 630s that have network connections) and on non RAID
IDE I would be covered.

What about JBOD? What is RAID 0, RAID 1, and is RAID 0+1 a
combination of striping and mirroring in some way?

Also, what is the story on RAID 5? Does it require 4 hard drives, and
if so, why didn't Asus build it into the A8V board?

Also, thank you VERY much for your excellent reply. I appreciate
everyone's help here.

RAID5 can be done on as few as three drives.

JBOD stands for Just A Bunch Of Disks.

0+1 consists of two pairs of disks, each pair is a stripe, and
the pairs mirror one another. If a single disk fails, one stripe
breaks, but the pair of disks in the other stripe take over.

I'm afraid for the rest of your questions, you'll have to hit
a search engine. Due to my lack of experience, there are better
sources of info out there than I can provide.

To find out about fast disks, www.storagereview.com is a good
place to look. They have a performance database, and they keep
track of disk speeds, noise and heat. That is where I go, to
figure out which brand of disk to buy. For general discussions
about building arrays, the forums at 2cpu.com are a lot of fun.
The 2cpu people do a lot of server stuff, and that is where
RAID is a good thing, in a server environment.

Paul