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

To: Sexton O Blake who wrote (74353)	3/2/2011 7:30:05 PM
From: Raptech	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110645

Don't pre-judge the waitress. My niece put herself through college being a waitress. Degree in computer science, and now in the process of being MS certified. Wish she lived in my city. I knew exactly what I was buying when I bought with Raid installed, and I did not suggest that Raid slowed down my computer, but the computer does slow down for about 10 - 20 minutes when the Raid drive is writing back to the C drive to correct a detected error. My computer normally runs very fast with 3gb of ram on XP and very well managed active tasks and services. Perhaps the slow down is in my Raid software. What software are you using to control Raid.

To: Sexton O Blake who wrote (74353)	3/2/2011 7:49:12 PM
From: shadowman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110645

About RAID..one man's opinion..Fred Langa.(I like Langa) From a recent Windows Secrets newsletter. Value of a RAID configuration on a desktop? Karl Barton's desktop RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system is broken. There's a fix, but it raises the question: Why use RAID on a desktop system at all? "I have two hard drives (RAID 0, striped configuration) and am getting an error on one of them when my computer starts up. I was wondering what it could be. The computer seems to be running okay. It properly shows the total size of both drives — as do other places I check (hardware manager, properties, etc.) "I have run Windows CHKDSK but found no errors." A RAID 0 setup interleafs your data across two drives. As a result, both drives must operate in close sync. (Need help with RAID basics? See About.com's story, "What is RAID?" or PCGuide's RAID reference guide.) My guess is that one of your drives isn't spinning up fast enough and is being left behind by the other drive at startup. With every other piece of data missing or delayed, the system can't start normally. However, once the drive has warmed up and is operating at normal speed, it works fine and passes your CHKDSK tests. Uneven drive performance can happen when the drives' specs are significantly different or if one of the drives has sustained damage or heavy wear, causing it to behave differently from its twin. Your note isn't clear about the age of the drive that's failing. With wear and time, a drive's lubricants slowly degrade and may become thickened, either through chemical changes or with tiny particles worn off the bearing surfaces. Eventually, it shows up as reduced performance, especially at startup when the drives are cold — which is when you say your problem occurs. Replacing the problematic drive(s) with exactly matching new drives will probably solve the startup problem. But before you go that route, I suggest that you rethink your use of RAID. Most of the original impetus for RAID is now passé on desktop systems. Invented in 1987, RAID is now considered ancient computer tech. The basic idea was simply to gang together several small, somewhat less-expensive drives as a way to overcome the high cost and low performance and reliability of the larger drives, then available. For example, in 1987 a 10MB drive cost about $900, or a whopping $90 per megabyte. But today, hard-drive storage cost has dropped by a factor of 10,000 (!) to around $0.09 per megabyte. (For example, you can buy a 1TB drive for about $90.) So saving money fails as a rational argument in favor of RAID. RAID 0 striping was specifically invented to work around the throughput bottlenecks of the slow-spinning, slow-acting drives of the day. But today's top-notch, 10,000 RPM SATA drives are screamingly fast. With enormous throughput already available from a single drive, a RAID 0 setup really adds nothing to a desktop system except needless complexity. There are a few special cases — especially in mission-critical server setups — where some varieties of RAID can provide highly effective fault tolerance and data redundancy. But, again, I think RAID is needless overkill on most desktop systems. It's something to think about, Karl. A simpler setup may serve you better.