DaftFader;314537 wrote:
can you not also have mixed striped and mirrored? ..
eg. 2 HD’s on striped to make it fast then one bigger one on a mirror of the striped raid to back the stuff up:wink:
Yeah – that’s RAID 5 (you need a decent controller though, as many integrated motherboard ones only support RAID 0 (striped), and RAID 1 (mirrored) along with RAID 0+1).
RAID 5 (striped with distributed parity) needs 3 disks basically (all same size and preferably same model), which combine to form a striped array with capacity equal to 2 of the disks – it can recover from the loss of one of the disks, so is fairly safe but does lower the stripe performance wrt RAID 0…
There are a bunch of other RAID levels and setup complexities but 0, 1 and 5 are probably the most useful (unless you’re running a server box in which case RAID 6 (striped with dual parity) might come in handy…)
As a point of interest – you do realise that using a striped array as your system disk is going to slow your PC down? Striped arrays have slower access and seek times than single drives (owing to the extra complexity of the data being spread across 2 drives) – resulting in slower access for anything other than large files – striping only comes into it’s own when accessing and writing long data streams (like video or such) where the sustained transfer speed can come into play…
I’ve always preferred a single, fast disk to install the system on, and then used a stripe for data and recording purposes (with a sensible backup plan in place just in case)…
