I don't know anything about RAID except that there are different layouts or something and more than one hard drive. Is there a layout that will make my hard disk performance faster? If so, which one is it and how much faster is it? Any links to an informative site would be greatly appreciated.
2007-01-01 08:40:39 · 6 answers · asked by Dre D 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
It depends on the raid level and how your data is accessed.
It might.
In general, fault-tolerant raid levels speeds up reads and slows down writes.
Raid 0 (striping) would give you the best performance - but no redundancy. Raid 1 (mirroring) gives good redundancy (but with slower writes and slightly faster reads.).
However, simply buying a faster drive (10,000-15,000) RPM with a faster interface (ultra-wide/fast SCSI at 320MBps or 800MBps fire-wire) for that 10% of data that needs speeding up - will likely do a lot more.
You first need to determine if your current drives are the "bottleneck" in your configuration, and what can be done to speed those up first (specific file placement), drive cache, system cache, correct cabling type, bus speed.
I'm sure the previously recommended Wiki article is enough to get you going.
Or, just buy a Raid 5 storage array.
2007-01-01 10:28:01 · answer #1 · answered by Jon W 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
First in order to use raid you must have at least 2 identical Hard drives.
Second Raid 0 Striping is the only raid that increases speed data is accessed. It does this by storing different parts of the same file on each hard drive in the configuration. So instead of having to wait another full revolution of the Hard Drive to access the file it simply gets the rest from the next Hard Drive. The more Hard Drives you have the faster the data will be accessed.
Raid is mostly used by servers. For the average user it is best to find a Hard Drive with the most RPMs. Most laptops and low end desktops use 5400 RPM Hard Drives. 7200 RPMs is th fastest you can get for an IDE system. If you are using SCSI or SATA you can find Hard Drives that run at 10,000 RPMs, but they are very expensive.
2007-01-01 12:40:28 · answer #2 · answered by Onikazi 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
It just makes a copy of your partition of your main primary drive and puts it on a second hard drive if u have one, so that if you have a problem with your main hard drive like its messed up the data or is damaged, it activates your second hard drive which has the same data thats stored from the first one. Thats what the operation of raid does. It would not speed up the performance, just only benefits from helping u keep your files backed up/saved and ready to go.
2007-01-01 09:31:08 · answer #3 · answered by BMC_17 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋
I beleive all it does is change the way you save your Data. Certain layouts save data in different ways such as a backup incase your computer crashes.
2007-01-01 08:45:20 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Wikipedia is your friend. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
2007-01-01 08:51:23 · answer #5 · answered by Jonathan 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
RAID kills insects you silly....
2007-01-01 08:42:38 · answer #6 · answered by cj.. 3 · 0⤊ 4⤋