Raid

[Nosfy]

Hello.

 

Can someone explain to me what Raid 0 and stuff is and its purpose.

 

For a long time i have heard about this but still have not idea what it is.

[lonestar31]

Linus actually has a couple videos up on their youtube channel explaining this. Go check those out

[RuLeZ]

Its to make 2 drives act like one, increases speed, but double the risk of failures.

[Bittenfleax]

Hello.

 

Can someone explain to me what Raid 0 and stuff is and its purpose.

 

For a long time i have heard about this but still have not idea what it is.

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

 

You might not get a lot of the stuff, but it points out the GOOD parts and BAD parts of each type of raid. 

 

And what @lonestar31 said.

[Nosfy]

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

 

You might not get a lot of the stuff, but it points out the GOOD parts and BAD parts of each type of raid. 

 

And what @lonestar31 said.

 

It is quite common for people to do this?

[Bittenfleax]

It is quite common for people to do this?

In Enterprise/server usage, then YES.

 

For home use, not so much. Technically advanced people might use it at home just for fun and better performance etc. 

 

But in servers, you aim for 100% up time so a RAID 5 might be good (depending on what the server is) because you have good redundancy so if one drive fails, the server does not stop and data is not lost. You just swap the drive out and it carries on. All servers (unless it is bad) use hardware RAID. Which is where it will use a RAID controller to handle everything so it is not taxing on server resources whereas some home setups with RAID, probably use software which is a lot less reliable due to software failing and instability. So for that reason software based RAID is not used in servers. 

[Nosfy]

In Enterprise/server usage, then YES.

 

For home use, not so much. Technically advanced people might use it at home just for fun and better performance etc. 

 

But in servers, you aim for 100% up time so a RAID 5 might be good (depending on what the server is) because you have good redundancy so if one drive fails, the server does not stop. You just swap the drive out and it carries on. All servers (unless it is bad) use hardware RAID. Which is where it will use a RAID controller to handle everything so it is not taxing on server resources whereas some home setups with RAID, probably use software which is a lot less reliable due to software failing and instability. So for that reason software based RAID is not used in servers. 

 

So for me personally, I have never really more than on HDD but mine is now getting full so will need another one. Would something like raid 0 be worth considering it or its not worth.

[Bittenfleax]

So for me personally, I have never really more than on HDD but mine is now getting full so will need another one. Would something like raid 0 be worth considering it or its not worth.

Well, if you need space then RAID 0 won't be the answer. RAID 0 will join the drives together a good example is this: 

 

You want to load a 1GB Document from your hard drive.

Normally your hard drive will load the 1GB and it will take 10 seconds (for example)

With RAID 0, one hard drive will load 500MB and the other will load 500MB so it will only take 5 seconds. 

 

These numbers are not accurate, I just rounded them for being easy to understand.

If you want more space, just get another hard drive. 

[EmeraldFlame]

Basically RAID is a way of combining multiple physical drives into a single logical one (multiple hard drives show up as a single drive letter in the OS) to improve performance in some way. RAID 0 improves read/write performance but makes data loss more probable. RAID 1 makes data loss less probably because you have redundancy, but does not increase performance and takes up a lot of your HDD space. RAID 10 increases performance and decreases the probability of data loss, but is expensive monetarily to implement. RAID 5 and 6 improve read speeds, may or may not improve writes depending on your exact setup, but also decreases the probability of data loss, while being cheaper than RAID 10.

All the different levels of raid are about tradeoffs, where you give up some aspect of performance to make gains in another aspect depending on the situation you are in and what you need.