I figured I'd just throw this added info out there just re-iterate,
reinforce and confuse things further:
Out of the RAID levels we've discussed so far, only RAID5 and RAID1 will
allow the failure of a single disk without loss of data.
With RAID0 (disk striping w/o parity), the loss of one drive means the
loss of the data on the array. Best performance and storage value, but
no parity so no redundancy. Minimum 2 drives.
With RAID5 (disk striping WITH parity), parity data are used so that the
stripes from the missing drive can be recalculated on the fly allowing
time to rescue data and replace the drive. Minimum 3 drives.
With RAID1 (disk mirroring), the same data is written to both drives.
Read performance is typically faster than write performance here since
they act as a RAID0 array on reads. One drive can fail with no data
loss. Minimum of 2 drives required for the basic set-up. RAID1 doubles
the cost of storage since 2 drives are needed, but you only get half of
the total disk capacity.
There are other RAID configurations but these are the classics. The
others are generally variations or combinations of these. RAID10 is one
of my favorites: Stripes on mirrors. Pure disky sweetness. Minimum 4
disks.
I prefer a hardware controller with a battery-backed cache to off-load
I/O processing and improve performance. Hardware RAID of that level
could be overkill depending on the use of the box. >shrug<
With all that crap being said, I'm wondering if something like this
might be a good simple purpose-built option:
http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1131832
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 02 2007 - 15:23:18 EDT