[X4U] RAID Software Feedback

[Philip J Robar]

On Oct 19, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Stephen Lanza wrote:

> I have started looking at RAID software products. I am accumulating a 
> number
> of odd sized hard drives (20, 30, 60 GB) and would like to use them in 
> a
> more efficient manner.

Given that you can buy a 160-200 GB drive for well under $100 without a 
rebate, why bother? (I've seen 120 GB drives for $40 after rebate 
recently.)

Raid 5 requires drives of similar size and all of the space on one of 
the drives in the array is lost to check summing. Given the three 
drives you mention above you'd end up with a 40 GB array. Of course 
RAID 5 does have the advantage of reliability in the face of a drive 
failure.

Note that several recent reviews have shown conclusively that two drive 
RAID 0 setups are not significantly faster than a single drive in 
single user systems. Quoting from AnandTech (http://tinyurl.com/5myyl):

"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: 
there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop 
computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best 
and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time 
between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."


Phil