On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 09:35:05AM -0400, Ian D. Stewart wrote: > As the size of IDE hard drives increase, what are the > advantages/disadvantages of using a single large hard drive as opposed > to a RAID stack
Well, that depends on what flavor of RAID you're talking about... In general: RAID 0: Capacity = sum of all disks, improved performance, reduced reliability (if one drive fails, everything goes with it) RAID 1: Capacity = smallest disk, read performance could improve but is usually not affected, write performance tends to be slower, best reliability (as long as one disk survives, your data is OK) RAID 5: Capacity = smallest disk * (number of disks - 1), improved perfomance, data can survive failure of one disk, but all is lost if a second disk fails before the contents of the first are regenerated RAID 0+1: Capacity = smallest disk * (number of disks / 2), good performance, good reliability > (say, 80 GB hard drive vs. raid tower w/ 4 20 GB hard > drives) ? If you're getting 80G from 4*20G drive, that must be a RAID 0, so the RAID would give you a nice boost to data transfer rates, but you'd better keep a current backup because if any one of those 4 drives goes bad, you'll lose all your data. (OTOH, add a fifth 20G drive, make it a RAID 5, and you'll have a winner.) Side note: Comments on performance assume that each drive is on a separate IDE channel all by itself. If your 4 20G drives are hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd, you're going to take a major performance hit. Unlike SCSI, IDE can't run two drives efficiently on the same channel. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]