[G4] EIDE and Ultra ATA RAID

[Johns Maillist]

On Apr 24, 2005, at 10:27 PM, Philip J Robar wrote:

>
> On Apr 24, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Kevin Willis wrote:
>
>> I have been using a 120 GB Western Digital EIDE drive in my G4 for 
>> about a year.  I also have 2 40 GB Ultra ATA drives installed.  I 
>> recently picked up a 120 GB Ultra ATA Seagate drive that I put in 
>> place of one of the 40 GB drives.
>>
>>  I am planning on setting up a Striped RAID using the 2 120 GB drives 
>> and installing Tiger on it.  Is this possible even with the 2 
>> different interfaces?  If it is possible, would it be worth spending 
>> another $80 or $90 to get another Ultra ATA drive to use in place of 
>> the EIDE drive?
>
> "EIDE" and "Ultra" are names made up by marketing types. ATA is the 
> official spec. Your EIDE drive is an ATA drive. Search the web if 
> you'd like details.
>
> Yes, you can stripe them, but be aware that this increases your chance 
> of data loss due to hardware failure - if either drive fails you loose 
> all of your data. Also stripping does not provide a performance 
> benefit for typical single user desktop installations. For details see 
> AnandTech, http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101. 
> Quoting from the article's conclusion:
>
>     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.
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2005, at 9:04 PM, Johns Maillist wrote:
>
>> The best idea is to buy another Serial ATA drive, add it to the 
>> system, STRIPE the two SATA drives!
>
> Kevin said nothing about having a serial ATA drive. Unless he says 
> otherwise, I'm assuming that all of the drives he has have parallel 
> ATA interfaces.
>
>
> Phil
>
Yes, that is correct, I misread that part about the SATA card.
The noted possibility of data loss in the case of one drive failing is 
correct.
Buy, I often wonder what happens if you do not run a STRIPE set, just a 
standard drive set up, one ATA drive, and IT fails. Do you not lose 
your data?
The safer manner is to use mirrored system.
This is assuming that you NEED a RAID array. I am happy with mine, 
since I do video editing work, and it does provide a speed icrease.
The caveat is: ALWAYS, and I do mean ALWAYS, back up your files!
John


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