Help me to understand RAID

ok, if I install a second 320 gig hard drive (found out that I do indeed have the second hard drive enclosure), should I set it up in bios as raid 0 or raid 1?

Next, do I have to put in the same size hard drive to use raid?

What is the benefit of using raid?

What is the best 7200 rpm hard drive (not momentus xt) on the market. I've read some really bad reviews out there.

TIA or point me in the right direction so I don't have to look through hundreds of pages on this forum.

 

If you want the hard drives to work together as one then use Raid 0. The hard drives must be of the same size for you to be able to setup Raid 0. This means the system will show one hard drive as 640 gb instead of two individual drives listed as 320 gb each. The advantage to this is that load and write speeds will be quicker. The disadvantage is that if one drive fails then you will no longer be able to boot your laptop and your data will be lost.

Raid 1 sets your drives to mirror each other. This means that both hard drives will have the exact same programs and settings on them. The only advantage of setting up this way is that if one drive fails then you can still boot your laptop and it will be exactly the same. No loss of data. This is mainly used in servers as this is an easy way to have redundant backups. I have 5 hard drives setup mirroring each other here at work and also do tape backups of the server each night.

Western Digital makes great hard drives and also Seagate. I have never had either fail on me.

 

tldoney,

The choice of Raid 0 vs Raid 1 depends entirely what you're hoping to accomplish with Raid. Raid 0 uses two drives in series so that they function like one big drive. Raid 1 mirrors data between two drives causing both drives to be an exact copy of each other.

In Raid 0, if a drive dies you lose all your data. In Raid 1 if a drive dies your data is safe on the non-failed drive.

In all Raid configurations it's best if the drives are as identical as possible (speed, manufacturer, size, etc.). Having said that, however, I have successfully used drives from different manufacturers with no ill effects - however, your mileage may vary.

Currently, the best 7200 RPM drives on the market (at least in my opinion) are Western Digital Scorpio Black. Their performance is slightly less than Seagate, however I've never had a WD drive just up and die without warning. I have with Seagate.

An additional option - if you just need space - is to bypass Raid all together and just make both drives standalone. Then you can mix-n-match size, manufacturer, etc.

I personally use two 500gb Scorpio Blacks in Raid 0 for speed. However, I keep very thorough backups on an external USB drive in case disaster strikes.

 

When doing a RAID it is highly recommended to use 2 hard drives that are exactly the same product. If you can find out what your current one is and order the exact same part number you'll be ok.

RAID 0 would be what you want also. It increases performance by splitting the information between both hard drives at the same time. This in a sense allows double the information to be read and written at once (though it's definitely not double the performance).

RAID 0 also opens up issues that if 1 of the hard drives goes bad, then you lose all information because the information is evenly split on both drives.

I'm not up on the best drives out there though. Maybe some others have more on that.

 

Thanks so much. Seagate are the drives that I've been hearing bad things about. I think I'm just going to buy 2 500 gig hard drives. I want one for my M17x and one for my M11x.

 

I've had a number of problems with Seagate drives. I don't know how many we've had issues with in total at my workplace, but I've had to replace 2 in my workstation.

I know a number of people who have used Western Digital and Hitachi drives without any issues.