dixiechicken
Monday 05 January 2004 à 15:10
Yes and (no
).
Depends on the raid configuration.
2 first raid-levels 0 and 1, is striped or mirrored, and needs at least 2 physical drives.
raid level 3 and above needs at least 3 physical drives.
(one or more physical drives are used for the parity check bits)
For simplicitys sake I will assume your raid system consists of two physical drives.
A striped drive is faster than a single drive or mirrored drive system.
Striped means writing/reading data from/to the 2 drives at the same time.
(
half of the data goes to one drive the other
half onto the other drive )
Resulting in shorter read & write times.
Mirrored is just what the name implies an exact duplicate of ALL the data on both drives. Resulting in enhanced security and actually a very slight performance increase.
( in either writing or reading data - dont remeber which)
You can use your raid system in either configuration. With 2 physical drives you can also span them to a single logical drive, whith doubled space.
( two 120 Gb drives will appear as one 240Gb drive )
For
simplified operation in all raid-mode levels it's important that all physical drives are of the same
size and
make.
Go ahead and format & experiment with your raid system before recording anything vital on it, then you'll get a feeling for the different raidmodes.
(dont format your boot-drive - that will save you lots of time
)
Cheers: Dixiechicken