All of Slate's dumb questions

So . . . yea, I thought maybe this would be better than trying to space them all out over a number of sub-forums

1. SLI/Crossfire?

I've seen this term a lot in reference to computers. I know it means running two graphics cards at the same time.

Is there some reason you WOULDN'T want to do this?

2. Solid State Drive

What is it? It sounds like its just one giagantic RAM chip.

3. Dual Monitors with different programs
How do I do this? More specifically, is there some way to set it up that a game plays on my main laptop screen, and I can play a movie on the other?

4 What the hell is RAID?

I've tried to understand this, but fail miserably. It writes the data twice? Why?


Thats all I got, though I'm sure I'll think up something else, equally as dumb

 

1. If you don't game then you wouldn't need to get it. Or if you have a smaller notebook w/o the cooling capacity or want better battery life (unless there is a third/integrated GPU).

2. SSD is to HDD like LED is to CCFL. Solid state = no moving parts = faster/silent/less power, all around better (the good SSDs, not all are created equal, like not all monitors are equal) but costs more. Good SSDs use Samsung, Intel or Indilinx controller (for most consumer drives), enterprise drives can use Mtron or Memoright. Bad SSDs are typically Jmicron.

3. You need to make your game in windowed mode and drag another program such as a movie in WMP onto the 2nd screen.

4. There are many different types of RAID. RAID0 is data striping, it basically writes data to both by splitting files (make 2 hard drives look like 1 w/ double the speed but double failure rate since if one dies, both die). RAID0 is data mirroring, it makes an identical copy onto another hard drive for safety reasons. If you lose data on one hard drive then you still have the other one, but it is slower since it has to write things twice.

 

1. The reason someone would not want dual graphics card/GPUs are:
a. Cost
b. Power usage
c. Heat generation

2. Yes SSD is basically just a huge flash drive. Very fast at random reads in comparison with traditional HDDs. Large price difference, with SSD being more expensive, with drive sizes available also being considerably lower. There is also the issue over the type of drive; you might want to google MLC & SLC to find out more on this. Other large benefits of SSD are the weigh considerably less than HDDs, they use considerably less power, make less noise and are less prone to damage due to physical impact.

3. Again, as sgotgeta said. I actually tend not to use dual screens in games as I find it a little distracting. However, on my desktop machine at work I have three monitors as it makes work so much easier.

4. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. As this may suggest, RAID is a setup of data storage disks, (could be HDDs, could be SSDs) that have data written to multiple disks at the same time to safeguard against a single disk failure. The different numbers after RAID determine what level of redundancy you have, for example RAID 1 is referred to a mirrored, the data is placed on both drives at the same time in the same place.

The benefit of RAID is simply to ensure that if a drive is damaged, data is immediately recoverable. It was not intended to replace the need for a backup.

RAID 0 technically shouldn't be called RAID at all. RAID 0 is where you take two disks and in essence join them together to create one big disk (or at least that is how you will see it). What happens is that say you are saving a file, part of it gets saved to a space on the first drive, then the next part of it gets saved to the next drive and so on. This is why it is referred to as striping. However, there is absolutely no data redundancy - which is why in reality it shouldn't be called RAID at all. However, that is what it is commonly referred to as.

 

Nowadays it usually means Redundant Array of Independent Disks, since you can use super expensive drives and SSD's if you want.

 

Outside of specialist industries, I can't imagine why anyone would want to use SSDs in a RAID configuration other than in RAID 0, which as I said should not really be referred to as RAID at all. To be honest, offering RAID in some laptops is a bit overkill to be fair; again it really is meant for specialist uses.

Basically, RAID is used in environments where price is less important than maintaining a steady data supply. For example most servers will operate in a RAID environment due to the fact that, although disks are easy enough to replace, the work often has to be scheduled in. Also I can imagine when SSDs are used in military application, for example as data storage in fighter planes, then RAID I would anticipate is utilised.

Having a RAID setup for your average laptop user is just plain barmy. Buy a bigger disk to avoid "RAID 0", and simply ensure you make backups.