Comment Quick answers for the home user (Score 1) 181
There are three reasone to use RAID:
1. Reliability
You need to buy another controler and get disks as similar as possible. Use Raid 5 or 1 (mirroring).
2. Performance
Buy another controler (as MB controlers aren't independent (as mentioned)) and run RAID 0 _and_back_it_up_to_tape_ for fastest reads/writes or RAID 1 for faster reads.
Again, get similar disks as you will be limited by the weakest link in the chain
3. Just want to play/can say you have RAID
If you can't justify buying a controler/disks (read: no real reason to run RAID), do Linear Append on two disks on your "seperate" IDE cables.
Because of the way the ext2 FS statistically distributes data across the disks you should get slightly better performance if both disks are reasonable fast (don't do this with a old slow dog and a fast new disk).
The real answers for "the best RAID setup" depend on exactly what you want to do with it. eg., most web servers want fast reads an don't care too much about writes vs. production database servers want fast reads and writes but care most about data integrity (RAID 5 or 0+1).
or in mantra form:
If you want performace stripe it; if you want reliability mirror it; if you neeed space append it.
1. Reliability
You need to buy another controler and get disks as similar as possible. Use Raid 5 or 1 (mirroring).
2. Performance
Buy another controler (as MB controlers aren't independent (as mentioned)) and run RAID 0 _and_back_it_up_to_tape_ for fastest reads/writes or RAID 1 for faster reads.
Again, get similar disks as you will be limited by the weakest link in the chain
3. Just want to play/can say you have RAID
If you can't justify buying a controler/disks (read: no real reason to run RAID), do Linear Append on two disks on your "seperate" IDE cables.
Because of the way the ext2 FS statistically distributes data across the disks you should get slightly better performance if both disks are reasonable fast (don't do this with a old slow dog and a fast new disk).
The real answers for "the best RAID setup" depend on exactly what you want to do with it. eg., most web servers want fast reads an don't care too much about writes vs. production database servers want fast reads and writes but care most about data integrity (RAID 5 or 0+1).
or in mantra form:
If you want performace stripe it; if you want reliability mirror it; if you neeed space append it.
