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I use RAID 0 on my fastest computers. It significantly increases the
read data transfer rate. The difference in performance is very
noticeable.
It splits the data between two drives so for each access, half the
data comes from one drive and half comes from the other drive. Both
drives are considered a single "C" drive logically. So you would need
two identical physical drives (20 GB for example) and the RAID 0
array would look like a single 40 GB drive labeled drive "C".
If you wanted a back-up drive, you would need to add a third physical
drive which would become drive "D".
Here is the results of an NBench test on my year-old Athlon 750
system with three identical IBM 7200 RPM drives - two in a RAID 0
array (drive C), and one for backup (drive D). Data rates are in
bytes per second:
Drive C D Ratio
Write: 43 34 1.26
Read 52 33 1.58
IDE drives are now very fast and cost much less than SCSI. Several
motherboards have the RAID controller built in or a low cost option.
Bob Fulks
At 2:36 AM -0500 2/5/02, Simon Campbell wrote:
>I'm building a PC for trading purposes and the motherboard (Asus A7V266E) comes with RAID. Being rather PC illiterate, can someone explain in laymans terms what RAID is, or point me to a good web site. The stuff I've found so far has me more confused than was helpful.
>
>This machine will be a trading PC with two hard drives. One main drive and one for backup (using http://www.duocor.com/xc2k/).
>
>For my purposes, should I even care about RAID and if not, can it be disabled?
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