Raid Hard Drive Question

[RobertXYZ]

I am about to purchase a new hard drive and read "Western Digital
Caviar Raid Edition"


What does RAID mean ? What is the purpose of having a RAID system ?
Would you recommend to get this ?

Tks

RobertXYZ

[Trotter]

Any hard drive can be a RAID drive, so I don't know what the deal would be with this one. Care to post a link?

[RobertXYZ]

Originally Posted by Trotter

Any hard drive can be a RAID drive, so I don't know what the deal would be with this one. Care to post a link?

Here is the link to this particular hard drive :

Canada Computers - Hard Drives > Desktop Drives > 3.5" SATA Drives : Western Digital Caviar (WD5000ABYS) Raid Edition 500GB SATA 3Gb/s NCQ 7200RPM 16MB Buffer (OEM).

[helix2301]

The HDD has a built in buffer that is solid state to increase speed. Could also just go with a full solid state drive but they are very pricey right now.

[Trotter]

I don't see anything about solid state with it, but it is a NCQ (Native Command Queing) drive.

For the money, I would go with a couple of Seagate 7200.10 or 7200.11 drives with the same thing.

Either way, they will make a great RAID.

[Andyf]

To answer your first question, RAID is a method of connecting multiple HDs together to increase read speed, and/or to ensure multiple copies of data are created. There are various different types of RAID array (e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1 etc.), all with a specific purpose

Google the wiki article, it'll go into much better depth than I can.

Bear in mind though, that many studies have questioned the performance gain that can be obtained with RAID, and while some people go to great lengths to set up RAID 0 arrays for gaming computers, it is a heavily debated subject as to whether any useful performance gain is actually seen.

My view is that the gains are so small as not to be noticeable, with the opposite argument mainly sustained by those who have already spent large amounts on multiple hard disks, who don't want to think that they have wasted their investment.

[Trotter]

I missed the first question... my bad.

Layman's terms- RAID0 takes the data and splits it between the two drives. The speed comes because the data is written and read from both drives at the same time, halving (or close to it) the time required.

RAID1 works differently. RAID1 takes the data and writes it on two drives, using one as a copy of the other. No speed increase, but if your drive crashes you have an exact backup.