What is Raid ?

jamjar · 2 Dec 2009 at 18:35

Hi All i don,t want to sound thick ,but i read a lot of threads about having HDD drives in Raid ,what does this term mean ? :confused:

wesley · 2 Dec 2009 at 18:48

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=RAID

samir_ansari · 2 Dec 2009 at 20:24

that cuts deep everytime I see it

jbloggs · 2 Dec 2009 at 20:31

chaosophy · 2 Dec 2009 at 21:25

The basics are that you slap a load of discs together using s/w or h/w and present it to the o/s as one big logical drive. It is done for performance and/or resilience. In reality there is more to it than that but that's basically it.

jamjar · 2 Dec 2009 at 22:24

chaosophy said:
The basics are that you slap a load of discs together using s/w or h/w and present it to the o/s as one big logical drive. It is done for performance and/or resilience. In reality there is more to it than that but that's basically it.

So your better off getting one big HDD ? :confused:

chaosophy · 2 Dec 2009 at 22:39

jamjar said:
So your better off getting one big HDD ?

No.

chaosophy said:
The basics are that you slap a load of discs together using s/w or h/w and present it to the o/s as one big logical drive. It is done for performance and/or resilience. In reality there is more to it than that but that's basically it.

The only advantage of one big drive is that with some RAID levels you can lose space but gain resilience. But overall, especially for servers, storage systems etc, then RAID makes a lot of sense.

Stolly · 2 Dec 2009 at 22:50

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

malcolm · 3 Dec 2009 at 18:01

jamjar said:
Hi All i don,t want to sound thick ,but i read a lot of threads about having HDD drives in Raid ,what does this term mean ?

I'm amazed no-one else has said it, read the hard drive forum sticky, third thread from the top, all (well most) is explained.