[Laughter]

Hi!

I am buying a computer with 2 identical hard drives. The system is for creative/music/remixing purposes only. I plan on ripping my CD collection (pretty substantial) to the harddrive(s) and need some advice.

I am being given the following options:

Raid Cfg.: RAID-0 (Data Striping)
RAID-1 (Data Mirroring)
None

Which option should I choose from the 3 above, and also, why? Inquiring mind...

Thanks in advance to everyone!!!!! ~Laughter

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Striping gives you the full volume of the two disks
Mirroring halves it.

So the question is, Do you need a lot of storage, or half the storage which is protected from disk-screwups?
( and since you say ou're copying your CD's you need a lot of space and you have a backup, the CD's themself, I'd say stripe. )

This may be helpful.

Success
Ojo

[Ojoshiro]

Striping gives you the full volume of the two disks
Mirroring halves it.

So the question is, Do you need a lot of storage, or half the storage which is protected from disk-screwups?
( and since you say ou're copying your CD's you need a lot of space and you have a backup, the CD's themself, I'd say stripe. )

This may be helpful.

Success
Ojo

[audioboy]

the other option is not to raid at all, just have two indpendent drives.

raid 0 gives best performance speed wise, but if 1 disc crashes, all the data is lost from both drives.

raid 1 is mirroring, so if 1 drive crashes, you have an exact copy on the other.

my take on it (only my opinion) is that its kinda overkill for the average home user. possible home user applications where raid would be appropriate-
heavy data traffic, such as video editing- raid 0
critical system backup, such as a server- raid 1

[Rockster2U]

Another point of view. I haven't done any striping for almost 3 years because when and if you have a drive problem, you can't just slap the damaged goods in another machine or do a parallel installation and retrieve your data - you're SOL. The performance gain (3-5%) isn't worth it. Mirroring on the other hand can be a big plus but a good regimen of regular imaging and daily data backups somewhat negates this too. I still do a lot of mirrored arrays in commercial applications but find little use for it if in a home environment if one is a consciencious and responsible user. If you insist and want to get the real adavantage of a RAID configuration, go with 4 drives and do both a stripe and a mirror and then if you have a failed drive, you can simply replace it and rebuild the array with no losses incurred.

[admin]

Another vote for none. Not practical for most home users.