Raid confusion

[SparkleDJackson]

Hey dudes and dudettes. I have been wondering what is the point in raid. Does it show up as one drive. If i got a second wd black caviar 6gbps 2tb drive would that show up as one drive, would it be full capacity, will the combination of drives work faster than a solitary drive amd finally what is the likelyhood of failure. Ive tried wiki for answers but all it seems to do i confuse me with formulae.

If any of you more experienced guys can assist me on my quest for knowledge id be much appreciative am will give you discount on wheel bearings for your cars

Also

Can you run the mechanical drives in a raid array amd a ssd on its own non raided for boot and programs

This will get you a discount for bearings on your riello boiler. Its coming up to christmas. Keep an eye on them guys haha

 

[dugdiamond]

the capacity will be equal to the size of the smallest drive multiplied by the number of drives.

instead of a file existing on one drive, it is divided equally over the total raided drives. each drive reads its' part simultaneously, so read/write times are usually increased by the total drives that in an array. (4 HDDs will be ~200% faster than 2 drives, etc.)

furthermore, seek times can again be increased by 'short-stroking' the array. this means that data is written on the outmost areas of the platters first, thus enabling the heads to access the data even faster.

people almost always say that raiding your data increases the possiblity of data loss even more than normal. the is a phallacy... if a drive is due to pack in, it will! just like all drives. the point is that if 1 in an array of 4 drives fails, 25% of you data will be lost... and 75% of important stuff is useless, the way around this is to RAID6, or better still backup regulary.

i use a 64GB V+100 SSD for win7 (OS only), and 5x 1TB caviar blacks in raid0 (short-stroked). i also have a 3x 2TB caviar blues for backup. i back up monthly (non-OS) using an external HDD dock, and rotate the blues. this way, i have data covering 3months.

 

[CRAZYCAP]

It shows up as 1 drive mate.I have just RAID 0'd my 2 Agility 3 SSDs and I am over the moon with the performance 1156 mb/sec read speed.

 

[SparkleDJackson]

aw sweet guys. i might just pick another wd black. ive already got a 500gb external. thatll do for backups for a while considering my pc is still in a pile in work