John McGaw wrote:
"Rich" wrote in message

Please help educate me.

I am considering setting up a RAID system on my P4 computer. I
am anticipating that the advantage is mostly speed of access
increase for a striping setup.

What are the pros/cons of such a system? Can anyone give me a
target figure on access speed increase? I am currently running
ATA100 with a 7200rpm, 8Mb HD.

Pro: can be somewhat faster. Con: far less reliable: one slight
error on either drive and you've effectively lost the content on
both drives.

Personally, given the speed and capacity and price of modern IDE
drives I'd far rather have mirrored RAID and forego the possible
speed increase in favor of the reliability. Face it, with the size
of modern drives it is becoming increasingly impossible to do
decent backups. In the old days (10 years ago?) I could plug a
tape into my machine every night, start a backup and be done with
it. Now, how does one affordably back up a 250Gb drive so easily
and cheaply?

One installs a second drive and clones the first with XXCOPY (See
xxcopy.com). Any further backups are automatically incremental,
and go much faster. Then, WHEN the first drive fails, you have a
copy of everything. Your backup is probably done within 15
minutes, and may even be done in the background. For Linux, you
will have to build the equivalent yourself as far as I know.

--
Chuck F ) )
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
http://cbfalconer.home.att.net USE worldnet address!