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> I'm building a PC for trading purposes and the motherboard (Asus
> A7V266E) comes with RAID.
> For my purposes, should I even care about RAID and if not, can it
> be disabled?
I also just built a box with an Asus A7v266-E. The mobo is set up
for RAID but the RAID controller is an *option*. You have to pay
extra to ENable it. So DISabling it is pretty easy. :-)
Colin asked:
> What did you do or research to arrive at a decision to use
> http://www.duocor.com/xc2k/)? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought
> RAID 1 was disk mirroring, and should d1 fail, everything keeps on
> truckin' on d2 until d1 is replace while the computer is still
> running, and re-mirroring is automatic.
RAID mirroring is NOT a replacement for backups. They perform
totally different functions.
There are two major types of RAID, RAID-0 (striping) and RAID-1
(mirroring). See
http://www.uni-mainz.de/~neuffer/scsi/what_is_raid.html for a list of
all the different RAID flavors.
If you use striping, you should see a performance increase because
you're using two drives in parallel. However see
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=913&p=12 where they
say you'll probably only see a 15-20% boost in real-world
applications. For that reason I decided to hold off on adding the
RAID controller to my Asus board.
RAID-1 mirroring provides hardware redundancy. If one disk fails,
you can automatically switch over to the remaining disk without a
hiccup.
However, mirroring doesn't help if you delete or corrupt a file, or
if you get a killer virus. Whatever happens to one disk, for good or
ill, happens to both. The mirrored drive won't help you any because
IT will be corrupted too.
For protection against those kinds of problems, and for archival
storage of important data, there's no substitute for backups.
Gary
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