Basic Question about RAID disk size.

[hardwareguy]

Hello All,
I am newcomer to RAID.
I have seagate 340016A x 2 Disks. I have Windows 2000 Professional installed on my computer. If I configure two disks as RAID what will be final size of my RAID disk? Are 340016A Baracuda disk suitable for RAID. I don't have RAID card.
thanks

 

[mttk]

Your Seagate disks will be fine for a software RAID array. You really have two options and I suggest you use the RAID-1 cofiguration although you will end up with less storage, use will at least have security. Please bear in mind that no RAID will help you if your system become infected with a virus. RAID is purely for hardware failure and to increase disk performance.

RAID-0
RAID 0 implements a striped disk array, the data is broken down into blocks and each block is written to a separate disk drive. I/O performance is greatly improved by spreading the I/O load across many channels and drives. Best performance is achieved when data is striped across multiple controllers with only one drive per controller.

No parity calculation overhead is involved.
Very simple design.
Easy to implement.

Disadvantages
Not a "True" RAID because it is NOT fault-tolerant.
The failure of just one drive will result in all data in an array being lost.


Should never be used in mission critical environments.

Recommended Applications
Video Production and Editing.
Image Editing.
Pre-Press Applications.
Any application requiring high bandwidth.

Alternately...

RAID-1
One Write or two Reads possible per mirrored pair.
Twice the Read transaction rate of single disks, same Write transaction rate as single disks.

100% redundancy of data means no rebuild is necessary in case of a disk failure, just a copy to the replacement disk.
Transfer rate per block is equal to that of a single disk.
Under certain circumstances, RAID 1 can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failures.

Simplest RAID storage subsystem design.

Disadvantages
Highest disk overhead of all RAID types (100%) - inefficient.

Typically the RAID function is done by system software, loading the CPU/Server and possibly degrading throughput at high activity levels. Hardware implementation is strongly recommended.

May not support hot swap of failed disk when implemented in "software"

Recommended Applications
Accounting.
Payroll.
Financial.
Any application requiring very high availability.

 

[ravinapte]

Hello,
thanks for reply. I am using it for my video application. So,I think I will go for RAID 0.
thanks