RAID advice

[j3tt16]

I wanted to RAID a couple of hard drives on my system. What would you guys recommend? I was looking at buying a cheap PCI card if I could. Would I need to get a card that supports RAID or could I just buy any PCI card? Thanks

 

[agdickinson]

RAID

What sort of RAID are you looking at?

RAID 0 = Stripped drives
RAID 1 = Mirrored Drives

Also what sort of MAC do you have?

I know you can do software mirroring with OSX using the Disk Utility in OSX.

This allows either Stripe or Mirroring in Software.
<RANT>
Stripe basically combine two drives together ie. 250Gb + 250Gb to make one drive. The data is stripped across both disks to make very fast access to the drive. The downside is if you loose one drive you are likely to be up a certain creek with out a paddle.

Mirror as the name suggest copies data to both disks at once giving a level of redundancy so if one drive fails no data is lost.
</RANT>

Sorry for the Rant on if you already know this and 'Teaching your granny to suck eggs' I apologise




Might help if I read you post.... Getting old...

I think most cards should work though. I've seen a few reviews in Barefeats.com on RAID cards. Hardware RAID is normally faster than software RAID...

I've seen this article which might be some help:

http://barefeats.com/hard35.html

Hope this is of help.

Andrew