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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raptech who wrote (74349)	3/2/2011 11:16:50 AM
From: Sexton O Blake	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110644

Well a quick read of your "yahoo" post deals with performance. As I stated already, under "normal" circumstances, RAID 1 should not perform either a read or write hit. There are possible ways to enhance reading but I am going in on this with the assumption that I gain or lose nothing in performance -- but that I will gain in confidence that if one drive fails the data is still going to be accessible. Said another way - if you think your machine is slower because of RAID 1 - that would be a WRONG assumption AFAIK. And if it were because of some hardware overhead, I would suspect it would not be something noticeable. Your CPU / memory should be your focus on making the machine faster. I have no clue on your technical abilities, however, if you read my review (posted this before) ... epinions.com You will see that after I had the RAID going, I did some fiddling around and was able to "undo" the RAID - and clearly both drives showed both sets of information; both drives were 100% accessible. In other words, if you had a second computer and threw one of your RAID 1 drives into the machine, it should be readable. Once you put it back in your system there may be a RAID 1 failure and it might need to rebuild the drive. When I played no data was at stake and I was comfortable with my findings. But telling a stranger to try this stuff is something else. WIKI offers a great explanation. There are REAMS of technical pages on this. FWIW - Yahoo answers would be the last place I would get advice. Sort of like asking the waitress at the coffee shop about buying a stock, over asking people on SI. If you had bot 2x500GB drives, you had two options: a) 2 drives - total 1000GB capacity, no data/failure protection OR b) 2 drives - total 500GB capacity, data/failure protection if one drive fails. (NOTE: If you were given the option of "2x500GB drives at 7200RPM" v. "2x500GB drives at 5400 RPM - RAID 1" ONE MILLION PERCENT your system would be slower --- but NOT BECAUSE OF RAID 1 but because they sold you two slower drives. If both (a) & (b) had 7200RPM drives then the speed difference again would be zero to negligible And to be 100% clear - I have seen Dell's online shop and devil in the details - seeing two drives with RAID sold slightly slower than buying one non-RAID - is 100% possible ... I would never stand for that - either I go no-RAID or RAID but the drive speeds are important.) Somehow you chose this when you bot your machine and it is clear that when it was purchased you had no clue what it meant. Fine - but it isn't a BAD thing. And as I suggested already, for $50-100 you can get a 500-2TB drive - open up the machine and throw it in. Not a big problem. (PS: What IS a bad thing -- when you have 500GB, and forget to back it up over a period of a month, you turn it on and now it won't boot since the drive is shot. With the cost of drives these days, in my world, every machine would come with RAID 1)