What is RAID?

[judge]

Last night I was showing a friend my train simulator and mentioned I had my OS and regular files on my 'C' Drive and my train simulator on my 'E' Drive.

He told me I could get improved performance if I configured my drives to RAID drives.

RAID is Greek to me.

After he left I rebooted and pressed F2 to get into setup. I noticed I could configure my drives to RAID but was afraid to do it because I have no idea what it does and I might lose everything.

What is it? How does it work? Would it improve my performance?

Noel

[longiron]

Close enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[obo]

I noticed I could configure my drives to RAID but was afraid to do it because I have no idea what it does and I might lose everything.

Yes you certainly could lose everything. Good move to wait until you better understand what is going on.

Personally I'm not a fan of people using RAID 0 (what your friend was suggesting) because it nearly doubles the chance of disk failure - if either of the two disks dies, all files are lost. A proper backup strategy can make the increased risk worthwhile but most people don't have this in place.

Regards,

Rob.

[eolesen]

You're better off with a decent backup strategy than investing the time in doing RAID.

RAID works great for large volumes of data that is always changing, and if you're going to do it, then just go straight to RAID5 or 6, which requires a minimum of three drives for RAID5, and can survive one being lost. You'll pay dearly for it, though between the ongoing cost of having multiple disks spinning at the same time, and in having an enclosure & interface to support it.

Constant use is what kills drives, and doing the multiple writes to different disks in the array might actually cost you some time, but it's faster than trying to do an hourly backup of a dataset that takes two hours to write to disk....

For home use, you're better off with a good strategy and sticking to it. For ultra-critical stuff you can't afford to lose, back up to a couple memory sticks and maybe also an online service. Don't rely on the online service only, especially if you've trashed your ability to connect to the internet... the other consideration is that companies don't last forever -- nobody expected MegaUpload to close down overnight, and now there are a lot of people stuck without their backups....

For ~$99 you can have a 1Tb external that you back up to on even numbered days or weeks, and for about the same cost, get another from another manufacturer to use on odd numbered days or weeks. I never buy two identical drives from the same lot (mix manufacturers, and you should be safe), and keep both of them in a place where they won't get bounced around.

Most appealing part of the external backups is that I don't have to worry about reformatting, hardware, or the OS I'm using... when you deal with things like RAID, you're introducing hardware dependencies.

I wrote a batch file which copies the changed files over, and twice a year, I'll delete out the "My Documents" path and start over clean on one week, and do the same a month later on the other drive. That's so that files I've deleted off my PC are ultimately wiped from the backups. Stuff like routes, rolling stock, photos, music all wind up being backed up in a path outside of "My Documents"...

[judge]

Thanx eolesen,

I already backup everything on two external hard drives. One for my regular files and one for MSTS. And I have had to use both on occasion.

Per your recommendation I'll just stick wiht what I have. My life is already complicated enough.

Noel

[mikephfl]

You want speed? Get a Solid State Hard Drive. A little more expensive but the speed change is well worth it. MSTS loads much quicker and the stutter between tiles is so small it's almost not noticeable at times. Not too mention that every program runs so much faster and boot up time is a lot faster as well.

I also implement a good backup strategy that consists of external hard drives, DVD's and memory cards and includes some sort of backup off site in my desk at work.

[judge]

I've been thinking of a solid state hard drive. I may get one when I come back from my vacation at the end of the month.

Noel