RAID questions

[slightofmind]

Out of courousity, since my computer is fritzing out in the first place, I have been putting some consideration into just building my own computer, and have been doing a little bit of research, and considering instead of just giong out and fixing this one on a constant basis, to do myself a favor.

Now, this post is about something one of my more tech savvy friends brought up while I was talking to him on the phone. RAID system setups. If I understand him correctly, this is something of a gosh darn cool thing, depending on if you go with the data striping or tha data mirroring. I can see the inherent advantages to either of these, but, which applications do these things work better in? Honestly, this would be a gaming platform, with a little bit of term papers and the like on the side. WOuld either of these setups be advantageous to high preformance gaming and/or high performance ummm.... papers about abnormal psychology?

 

[lotuseclat79]

slightofmind,

A good general rule of thumb to follow is to use a separate computer for games vs where you keep your valuable data, so whatever you build, be sure to backup your abnormal psychology papers either on the web or local media. Definitely don't play a game while you are writing your term papers or visa versa.

RAID is useful to keep systems going with mirrored disks that require it. I'm not a gamer, but have worked on RAID-1 disk software, so I am not aware of the extent to which RAID has been applied to gaming-only computers. As I understand RAID, its main purpose is to achieve high availability to keep computer systems going when things start to degrade in the system. As far as high performance, well that depends on exactly the inherent characteristics of your system components and how much you have to spend.

My advice is to consider your needs first in priority order - which is more important to you, and cost out whatever solution you choose to determine if you can afford it. Think long term vs short term goals!

-- Tom

 

[crjdriver]

Raid 0 [striping] increases hard disk performance. If you regularly open large files, write large files, etc, then you will see an increase in performance. Raid 1 [mirroring] does not increase performance, however if you have a hd failure, you can just swap out the bad disk and rebuild the array. There is no loss of data.

Raid is not difficult to setup, however it does require a few extra steps when setting up and loading the os. Once that is done, it is the same as any other system; just with either increased performance or increased hardware redundancy.