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Multiple hard drives

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photorock:

        When you write to a striped set the data is written across all drives, in other words data (file) is written to blocks on different drives depending on file size. A large file could have parts on all HD's. This is with Raid 0, now Raid 5 does the same thing but adds a parity bit for fault tolerence (recovery). In other words if one drive fails you will have to reload all files to those HD's.
        I'm no expert by any means, I just want you to be aware of the limitations of using that Raid card.
        There are a lot of Computer Guru's here who may be able to explain it better. I hope this helps.

Tiger-Heli:

Just snooped on www.pricewatch.com - Assuming you're in the US, you can get an IDE controller card for about $15.  I don't think you HAVE to set the additional drives up as RAID.  This would allow you to use all your drives and the CD-ROM.

OTOH, a 20.0 GB drive is only $33 with shipping, and might be a more sensible option.

krick:

With a standard motherboard + a FastTrak card, you can actually have 8 IDE devices (hard drives and/or CD-ROMs) connected...

Motherboard: 2 IDE channels x 2 drives per channel = 4 drives
IDE card: 2 IDE channels x 2 drives per channel = 4 drives

Here's a good review of the FastTrak66...
http://www.2cpu.com/articles/64_1.html


--- Quote ---RAID Level 1 (Mirroring)
This is a "security" setting. Mirroring does exactly what it says. It mirrors all information on the primary hard drive to a secondary hard drive. This is completely transparent and automatic. All data is always written to both drives. In the case of a drive failure, the bad drive can be replaced by the "back-up" drive with no loss of data.

RAID Level 0 (Striping)
This is a "performance" setting. You can use 2-4 drives in this array on two channels. All drives are treated as one big, single hard drive. All data is split between the two IDE channels (i.e. All even bits are written to the drives on IDE 1, and all odd bits are written to the drives on IDE 2), which allows the CPU to access information from two channels simultaneously, theoretically doubling transfer speeds.

RAID Level 0+1 (Striping/Mirroring)
This setting allows for the increased performance of level 0 while maintaining the security of level 1. You will need 4 identical drives for this type of array. All data will be striped between the primary drives on channels one and two, while being mirrored to the secondary drives on channels one and two as well (confused yet?). In the odd chance that you lose two drives at the same time, you can swap both drives for new ones without losing any data (unless both drives are on the same channel).

JBOD (Spanning)
Spanning is not a "real" RAID array, but since it is supported by the FastTrak, I will cover it. All that spanning does is combine the total capacity of all the drives (up to four) in your system. This is unique in the fact that all drives will be treated by the computer as one large drive. No more C, D, E, and F drives... Just a C.

--- End quote ---

JBOD doesn't stripe the data.  It's not really a type of RAID.  There is no performance increase.  From what I've read, if one drive fails in a JBOD setup, you can still get the data off the other individual drives.




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