I'm not an expert on RAID by any means, but I can relate what I've been told by our IS dept in relation to my dev box for example.
There are different levels of RAID. The RAID setup that I have on my dev box is twin SCSI disks with a mirrored RAID array across the disks. So I have 2 x 250GB disks but they're mirrored, which means I still only have 250GB of usuable space. And I just see it as 1 volume (Drive C). What I've been told (and also read elsewhere) is that while this provides no redundancy for HW failure, it does significantly improve disk read times, since the disk controller can be reading e.g. half of a file from one disk and half of the same file from the other disk at the same time, theoretically resulting in a read time approaching half as long as if it was reading the file from only one disk. The "pretty impressive transfer rates" that Alister mentioned would be along the same lines, although his suggestion also obviously provides for an element of redundancy. HTH, Conor -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of PDS - John What is the benefit of a RAID system. As far as I know :) it is to run multiple HDDs sharing storage across the HDDs, isn't it? So assuming all OS related stuff sits on one HDD and all my docs and projects etc sit on a 2nd HDD then I don't need RAID, or? > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:offtopic- > > If your really after performance you could consider getting an SSD as > they have been steadily dropping in price. Alternatively consider some > sort of RAID system. A 7200 RPM 320GB drive costs less than $90. You > could get 4 of these in a RAID 5 system for under $400 (3 striped one > parity) - which would have pretty impressive transfer rates, plus > would handle a single drive failure. I have a pair of drives in my > home machine striped (I need to remember the mantra - backup, backup, > backup) > - and it's really fast for streaming data - probably wont decrease > your compile time as that usually involves lots of small files (I > believe SSDs are really good for this). _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group Offtopic mailing list Post: [email protected] Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/offtopic Unsubscribe: send an email to [email protected] with Subject: unsubscribe
