The misnomer is pretty appropriate now days, or so it seems. If you've
priced a 10k or 15k rpm >18GB scsi drive, and thinking you need 3 of them,
they're far from "inexpensive". Good drives like Seagate, IBM or the such
can run starting at $299, and that's OEM. Start talking >32GB and now
you're in the money, times 3. A decent, caching RAID controller can EASILY
run $1000 or more, still to this day.
If you want an inexpensive way to make sure your data is secure, load 2000
or XP, and DUPLEX the drives, RAID 1. 2 disks, 2 controllers and allow the
OS to do the mirroring. Simple.. if you want hardware mirroring, you'll
need a RAID controller at which you'd just as soon get a 3rd drive and do
level 5. Software mirroring in Windows 2000 can be easily and safely done
with IDE drives, as long as you keep each drive on different controllers.
IE: either 2 PCI controllers such as promise (at which you'll get duplexing
as well), or Primary and Secondary internal controllers. NEVER mirror an
IDE Master to an IDE Slave. If the Master dies, the slave will be
inaccessible as well. And of course, as mentioned here, companies such as
Promise and Adaptec now make RAID controllers for IDE disks as well. For
what the ham community will be doing with them, IDE will be plenty fast
enough.
Charlie
KI5XP
-----Original Message-----
From: writelog-bounces@contesting.com
[mailto:writelog-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of Hsu, Aaron
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 5:12 AM
To: 'writelog@contesting.com'
Subject: [WriteLog] Of RAID, Drives, warranties, and reliability...
(long)
My 2 cents...
RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Often (incorrectly), the word
"Inexpensive" is substituted with "Independent". I believe this error first
started when a well known computer magazine published an article with the
word "Independent" and the confusion began. As stated before, other devices
can also be configured "RAID-like". One common example are RAID Tape
arrays. I've seen multi-drive terrabyte LTO arrays at conventions.
Impressive!
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