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Considering I have no money for any hardware purchases at the moment this is but a pipe dream but THG recently did a review for some PCI RAID card and they suggested that it would be better to get PCI than onboard, I trust them on this issue, so I was wondering what Flibble, HLD and Ned's experience with these cards are or is it in fact better to get them onboard.

What are you recommendations for this as well.

*sleep trying to move with the times *

what level of RAID are you talking about?

hardware RAID far outweighs software RAID and personal preference would incline me to choose PCI over onboard but I dislike all the motherboards that incorporate sound/video and other gizmos into them.

What are you trying to accomplish by implementing RAID? Yes, I know data redundancy and fast recovery, but where, for a single home system, a network, Weasel's file server, etc....

I'm currently using a Gigabyte GA7-DXR+ motherboard with onboard Promise ATA133 RAID and 2x Maxtor 60GB hard disks. I haven't noticed any performace change at all from one disk and it's completely transparent to the operating system. In my opinion it's a much better solution to software mirroring as it doesn't rely on the CPU to maintain the copying process. I've had a bit of experience with PCI RAID controllers too, and functionality-wise there's not a lot of difference. The only real advantage is it allows for slightly cheaper upgrades as you can get a mobo that doesn't include onboard RAID.

I'm with Ned on the onboard gizmo's thing. I'd much rather have a basic mobo and expansion cards for sound/network/display then an integrated system. The audio and video components on those boards tend to be a bit on the lacking side.

Originally posted by Ned Flanders
What are you trying to accomplish by implementing RAID? Yes, I know data redundancy and fast recovery, but where, for a single home system, a network, Weasel's file server, etc....

Well I was mainly thinking from a backing up purpose, storing data. I obviously have a home system but if I am successful at home I would do it in work too, I have a copy of XP lying around that I have yet to install due to lack of funds for a new computer to run it on.

My big plan is to have one server running with ICS on it and two other networked PCs...just for the sake of it and I feel like building my own network server. I just feel like tinkering and this will give me the opportunity, and since mobo's with RAID are more expensive I was thinking the PCI card the best option. I don't really know anything about RAID, so are there any good tutoring books or online guides or something to get me started?

This is all theory at the moment and I just want to know for future reference/implementation. I also obviously don't want to waste too much of your time

Running a RAID for home or personal use is often more trouble and expense than it's worth. Unless your data are absolutely priceless, in my opinion, you are better off doing periodic data backups by whatever means you determine is the most cost effective (tape drive, ghost imaging, etc.).

If you have a business that depends on data being accessible and you need the redundancy of a RAID, I recommend running a SCSI RAID because they're 1) more reliable, 2) faster and 3) you get more geek points.

Originally posted by HighLordDave
3) you get more geek points.

**starts looking up the price of a SCSI RAID controller and 2x 100GB SCSI hard disks**

Anything for more geek points

Yeah, here at the office I'm running a scsi raid5 with 5 60GB HDD. It real sweet and purrs like a kitten. Of course, I'm yet to deal with the crisis of one of the disks actually crashing.

Do you have access to DSL in your area. ICS = evil, just my own opinion.

RAID is pretty basic stuff though.

RAID0 = disk striping without parity, basically contains several drives and collects them as one volume. No parity though so if one part of the volume fails, kiss it goodbye

RAID1 = disk mirroring/duplexing. this is probably the most viable option for home use and it used to be pricy but now that HDD are cheap, it's no matter. a software solution here would work just fine. the difference between mirroring and duplexing are mirroring uses one controller to write to both drives (slow) and duplexing uses two controllers, one for each drive.

RAID 2-4 don't remember and I'm not grabbing a book.

RAID5 disk striping with parity (this is THE RAID option for the workplace) again several drives are collected as a volume and then 1/x of the drives (where x is the number of drives) are used for parity writing. thus, if one drive fails, it can be removed and the data rewritten because the data is striped (for redundancy) across the remaining drives.

imaging or tape drives will work nicely as well.

And now I'm very very glad I have this system set up. One of my hard disks isn't going to last very long, and it'd take ages to get everything installed and reconfigured. Now I really hope it's easy to replace one of the disks

are you trying to say you've earned more geek points, flibs.

Originally posted by Ned Flanders
are you trying to say you've earned more geek points, flibs.

I'm surprised to find he actually WANTS more geek points, really...

What's wrong with MORE geek points? In this instance, I think I miss out. In order to qualify for more points I should already know the procedure for replacing a disk from the array.

out with the bad and in with the good. the hadrware ought to realize which drive has been replaced and given that info, should be able to rewrite the drive with the parity info. from the remaining drives; if it's RAID5.

If you're in for geek points you could build a RAID 5 from several RAID 0 or, even better, RAID 3 arrays (3 should be 0 and 1 combined, mirrored stripes, IIRC). This should take at least 12 drives of the same size, but it's certainly drop dead geek.