hard-drives

[Dinner]

MtG is on a thread closing rampage. Quick some body humor him before he closes this one!

[Ted Striker]

Well, for mid range needs, the ATA100s and ATA133's are pretty good, though I have personally seen some reliability problems. Maybe we just got a bad batch?

I wouldn't skimp on the hot swap bays though in the enterprise, they make life so much easier and prevent bloody knuckles.

[Urban Ranger]

Bloody knuckles? That's what chainmail gaunlets are for.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Oerdin
MtG is on a thread closing rampage. Quick some body humor him before he closes this one!

Just letting people know I'm around, is all.

[Graag]

I'm in the market for a new HDD at the moment...
my plan was to also go for the WD 80GB (good choice Jon ), but all this talk of RAID has befuddled me...

My main use for the HDD will be video editing and rendering, so I want the fastest possible HDD (for the money), though it'd be very nice to not have to worry about HDD failure when editing important video.

If I buy the WD 80GB HDD now, could I then buy another in a few months and a RAID card? Is a motherboard with onboard RAID in any way preferable?
Will RAID mean slower data tranfer rates?

Help!

I'm also debating which motherboard to buy, but thats for a different thread... *opens boring motherboard thread*.

[Ted Striker]

Hi Gragg,

I will let the hardware pros answer specifics. But in general:

You should usually buy the drive and the RAID cards at the same time. RAIDs need a minimum of 2 drives if you are using mirroring (RAID1).

If you want the fastest possible drives out there, you should get a SCSI drive. These carry a big price tag with them though, but they are blazing fast.

There shouldn't be much difference between a built in motherboard RAID card and a seperate RAID card.


The single drive system has worked well for most people, as long as you are diligent in backing up your important work. In my case, I have been too lazy sometimes to make sure I have backups, so I like to have something that is automatic, which is the beauty of a RAID1.

So it depends on your user habits. As Edan said, if you are confident that you will back up your files as you need to (like you burn them onto a CD on regular basis) RAID might be overkill. But is a definite luxury to have and can make life much easier.

[alva]

ATM go with that one, best value for money.

[MichaeltheGreat]

If you're talking real time, high res video editing, Seagate makes (or used to, they may not bother now that Ultra320 SCSI is available) a line of 10k and 15k RPM SCSI drives that are optimized for video work.

SCSI is not THAT expensive, once you digest the controller, and if you run Win2k, you can do a software RAID5, rather than having a RAID adapter.

You want to go to NTFS anyway for that sort of work.

[Graag]

Thanks for the help Ted... I'm afraid SCSI is a bit out of my range!

I still don't quite see how RAID works... in what sense is my data safe if one of the 80GB HDD fails? If both drives are full of data, how can RAID stop me losing it?

Oh, and the other point I should add is that I would still intend to run my current Seagate 20GB HDD with my OS, the 80GB HDD(s) would be purely to store video intended for editing. Would RAID still work in this case?

[Graag]

Thanks MtG....

But I am on a very limited budget, SCSI isn't an option. I'm lucky to able to afford the new CPU which will make the HDD necessary in the first place

Software RAID sounds promising, but I'm still not sure I see the point of RAID at all

[alva]

Because the data is on both drives...

[Ted Striker]

Well, to keep it simple, I'll use RAID1 as the example. In a RAID1, you have two drives, in a "mirror" mode. So, basically, the two hard drives are exact copies of each other. Say you have a gragg.mpg file, and you save it to your hard drive. In RAID1, that file is going to be saved on both drives instantaneously.

Okay, say you have your RAID1 up and running. Your primary drive fails!

Normally you would be screwed at this point, your system would shut down, and you would lose all your data. But with a RAID1, it will automatically switch to the backup drive, which is an exact copy of the primary drive. Your system will continue to run without interrption, and all data is saved.

When you're done working, and you shut down your pc, at that point all you have to do is pull the bad drive out and replace it with a new drive. Then you generally tell the RAID card to rebuild this new drive by copying the secondary drive onto the (new) primary drive.

Some RAID cards are so hard core that you don't have to do anything. You just slap a new drive in there and it will know how to rebuild the new drive. Almost always you will be able to work while the new drive is building also.

For your second question, technically there are some RAIDs you can build with different sized drives, but generally you want the drives to all be the same size, so I would say in your case, no, you won't be able to use a RAID.

What I do sometimes when I have two drives is to save important files on both drives, but again, that relies on your diligence.

[Graag]

Ok I think I get it... the data is split across both drives, they kind of act as one.
If I should have understood this by now ignore the question... but if you've got you're two 80GB RAID HDDs pretty full, e.g. 140GB of data and one fails, how can the other store enough data to provide a mirror of the first?

[Ted Striker]

Well, in a RAID1, the drives are actually mirrored.

So, if you have two 80GB drives in a RAID1, you will only be able to hold up to 80GB.

[Graag]

Oh. That simple huh? Think I'd rather have two 80GB drives then. All seems like a bit of a waste of space to me, unless the data was real vital.