[X4U] RAID Software Feedback

[Stephen Lanza]

On 10/19/04 8:52 PM, " Philip J Robar <philip.robar at myrealbox.com>" wrote:

> 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."

Actually, one reason that RAID-0 is useful is to take a number of smaller,
odd sized drives and make a larger drive out of them. At least that is my
understanding of what RAID-0 can do. Am I wrong on this?

Stephen Lanza
Software Complement