Raid Arrays??

Hi,

I've recently setup a new system. My motherboard has raid capabilities and I've heard a lot of good stuff about raid. I was wondering how you go about setting this up??

I know that you need two HD's, I've got 2 x 40 gb HD's, they are not identical in brand, but are identical in capacity. My MB is a ASUS A7v8X. Does a raid setup allow partitions??

Any help appreciated

Thanks

Justin

 

Hi Justin,

Your board will support Raid 0 or Raid 1.

Raid 0 writes to two drives in parallel (stripping) so you would get faster read/write performance. But since the information is split between two+ disks - if you lose one you've lost it all.

Raid 1 writes the same data to each disk (mirroring) You need at least two disks for this and with 2 40GB HDs you will only have 40GB of space as each is copy of the other.

The HDs don't need to be identical but you get the best performance if they are. If there are any differences in speed (rotation, access time seek time, etc.) then one of the disks will be waiting on the other and there goes your performance benefit.

Raid does support partitions but I couldn't tell you the first thing about setting them up. Maybe someone else on the board can provide you with that info.

Check this out for a little more info: Raid

Cheers,

Gary