Windows and the Mystery of RAID

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Jenkins
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Steve Jenkins

Hi,

Wonder if anyone can help. I'm looking for any websites/articles that
give a good introduction to using RAID on a Windows/Windows 2003
machine. Particularly answering following questions:

- How does RAID actually work? If I have two 120 GB IDE hard drives,
will RAID enable me to set them up such that any changes to one will
be automatically reflected on the other? If one dies, will the other
automatically kick in such that users notice no difference? Is that
actually how it works in practice or is it just a dream?
- How does RAID actually do what it does?
- Supposing I buy a DELL PowerEdge 600SC with a CERC ATA100 IDE Raid
Controller (+£206) - is this a good RAID controller? Will it need
special wierd software, or is it pretty standard as RAID goes?
- In Windows, if I buy a machine with a RAID controller will I also
need to setup some software - if so - which software?
- If I partition one drive, e.g. into C (20GB), D (100GB) - will that
automatically happen on the other drive?
- What's the difference between RAID 0, RAID 1, etc ...... ?

Thanks for any help and anyones time,
Steve.
 
Wonder if anyone can help. I'm looking for any websites/articles that
give a good introduction to using RAID on a Windows/Windows 2003
machine. Particularly answering following questions:

- How does RAID actually work? If I have two 120 GB IDE hard drives,
will RAID enable me to set them up such that any changes to one will
be automatically reflected on the other? If one dies, will the other
automatically kick in such that users notice no difference? Is that
actually how it works in practice or is it just a dream?
- How does RAID actually do what it does?
- Supposing I buy a DELL PowerEdge 600SC with a CERC ATA100 IDE Raid
Controller (+£206) - is this a good RAID controller? Will it need
special wierd software, or is it pretty standard as RAID goes?
- In Windows, if I buy a machine with a RAID controller will I also
need to setup some software - if so - which software?
- If I partition one drive, e.g. into C (20GB), D (100GB) - will that
automatically happen on the other drive?
- What's the difference between RAID 0, RAID 1, etc ...... ?
Click to expand...
There's two sorts of RAID. There's hardware RAID and there's software
RAID.

With hardware RAID you have a RAID controller card and you attach your
disks to that. With hardware RAID only special utilities are able to
tell that you have more than one disk attached. In other words with
hardware RAID it looks to the OS like a single disk.

With software RAID the OS writes to all physical disks itself. The OS
knows there are several disks out there but it tells you porkies and
pretends that the array is one disk.

Obviously hardware RAID is preferable to software RAID in most
situations. There are sometimes, but not always special drivers.

RAID controllers are sold for reliability and failure resilience. If
they didn't provide that no one would buy them and all the reviews
would be negative and they aren't. Of course nothing is 100% reliable,
but normally if a RAID disk dies the other disks keep the system
working.

Here's an explanation the different types of RAID:

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

In general, it's usually Raid 1 or Raid 5 that is used. Raid 0 is
sometimes used for fast writing but provides no resilience.

Cheers,

Cliff
 
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