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gee, a 50% net yield or a 66% net yield, doesn't should like much difference does it?
Raid percentage overhead (aggrate), on folks like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Oracle, Qualcomm, Music Match (now part of Yahoo), and the like are much better, on the order of 13-18% (even using RAID-5, RAID-3, RAID-4 or RAID-1 and it's derivatives 10 or 0+1), plus as many hot spares are your paranoia (read - value of data and uptime) desires.
If you want to get all of the technical ins and outs of Raid do a google search. Be sure and see if you can find the Berkley paper that started it all... This is what I've done for the last 20+years, design and sell computer storage.
The easiest, fastest, most reliable way for a home PC user to implement RAID is use good old RAID-1. Mirrored drives. Yep, you lose one for every one you mirror. Cheap insurance, easy to implement, rebuild is very straight forward, no degraded performance with a failed drive, no RAID-5 read/modify/write penalty (bet they didn't tell you about that one, huh?), and you get the best read performance because you aren't putting bits together from two (or more in a more typical RAID-5 setup) unsyncronized drives. Many motherboards have RAID-0 or 1 or others built in. You can/could also get an add-in board. They both work. I prefer the motherboard version as it is embedded, doesn't need additional drivers, and can be the system boot drive - straight up. Period. No fooling around with the man behind the curtain. HOWEVER, this does NOT protect you from deleting a file on your own... Just hardware errors at the drive. If the drive fails the MB or SW or PCI card (if it's a good one) will take that drive off line and notify you, and yet still run/boot/work.
Of course you still should do backups (backup? I didn't know my computer had a reverse...) to some other bit bucket. You could even backup to yet another RAID setup, or just to a USB drive or *shudder* tape. Tape backup is somewhat cumbersome for a home user. Even backup to DVD or CD is cumbersome, the medium is too small compared to todays disk drive sizes (and their true costs move faster than the price of gasoline be it up or done! The drive performance and capacity doubles while the price goes down... what a deal.) You SHOULD do permanant backups to DVD, but do two copies. Let's not get started about ablative technology and shelf life.
I do the following:
I have RAID-1 80 GB pairs as my C: and D: drives. Someday I'll move them to 250GB RAID-1 pairs, but my Saabs get that time *free* first!
I have 250GB single SATA drives that I use as bit buckets to do backups of important stuff, and I copy to each of them.
Then I have a NAS device, yep stuff goes there too, especially distributions and updates to software, this allows all of the computers on my network access to a single point of placement.
Then (you really didn't think I was done...) I have 80 & 200 GB USB drives to plug into my laptops (wireless backup works but too slow for entire drives), and do a powerquest backup (image type, but allows you to browse and restore any single file to an alternate location if optioned) via the usb on the laptop. I can then plug that into the desktop and either push to the NAS or to one of the 250GB storage tanks.
Now where is that pen...
, Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:04:50
, Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:42:54
, Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:53:32, Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:40:47
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