what is a raid controller?

[EggbornHatchedrotten]

One day the power flashed on and off, and ever since my computer keeps finding new hardware called a rad or raid controller. I have no clue what that is, I just tell it cancel, as it can't find it anywhere and move on. It seems to run OK, but what the heck did I break?

[Ylyrra]

Raid Controller... isn't that Chitiwok?

You broke the Wok??

[Iane_Blaidd]

RAID controller allows you to "manage" your hard drives

for example my motherboard has a built in 0+1 RAID controller
0 = mirrored = more or less 2 "drives" are exact copies of each other
1 = stripped = means 2 drives have bits of files
(ok i might have that backwards or not 100% too lazy to look it up)

mornally you would only use RAID for backups we use it on our servers because we have so much client data that we cannot lose.

because i am a cheap ass i use 4 hard drives in our main server 2 for 1 RAID and 2 for 0 RAID; you can buy controller cards that work better just don't feel like dishing out the extra money for them.

if you dont know what RAID is then you don't use it! i would let it install (need motherboard driver CD/DVD) just so you stop getting those pop ups.

I am sure one of the IT guys can explain it better

hope that helps a bit

[EggbornHatchedrotten]

Thanks Iane.

I have to find my discs. Moldy revamped my computer a few years ago, and since then I put them, somewhere. It wants a CD.

I need to bother Moldy!

The stuff I need the most, I use for school, and I back those up on our school's server. I am sure our computer person loves me with all the thousands of video and audio files that I keep.

[nenaa]

RAID controller allows you to "manage" your hard drives

for example my motherboard has a built in 0+1 RAID controller
0 = mirrored = more or less 2 "drives" are exact copies of each other
1 = stripped = means 2 drives have bits of files
(ok i might have that backwards or not 100% too lazy to look it up)

RAID is an acronym Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, the various disk combination methods (sometimes called levels) are given numbers for names. The original specifaction had 10 levels names 0 through 9. Generally only RAID 0,1,5, 6, and combinations of these are used these days.

RAID levels:

0 : Simple disk concatination. The computer sees all the space of the drives in the array as one big disk and data fills the space from the start of the array to the end. This provides NO protection from a drive failure. So if you have a 500GB disk and a 300GB disk, the server will see it as a 800GB disk.

1 : Is drive mirroring. The server will half the space in the array, but any files are written to both drives, this array can survive the failure of 1 disk. If you have a 500GB disk and 300GB disk, the server will see 1 300gb space and anything written will actually go on both drives, some RAID controllers require the drives in RAID 1 arrays to match size.

5 : Is stripeing with parity. The server will see a drive space of the smallest drive multilied by the number of drives in the array minus 1, 1 disk is required for the error checking parity. This array can survive the failure of 1 disk. if you have an array made up of 2 300GB drives and 1 500GB, the server will see a space of 600GB, again some RAID controllers require all the drives be the same size.

6 : Very similar to RAID 5 except that 2 drives are reserved for parity thus the total avaiable space is smaller by 1 drive, but this type of array can survive 2 drive faulres.

mornally you would only use RAID for backups we use it on our servers because we have so much client data that we cannot lose.

RAID is NOT a data integerity solution, there is NOTING in any raid arrays that provide for validating the data after it is written to the disk, RAID only allows one to gather up many drives to present to the server as 1 large space, with most levels protecting agains drive failures. If you also need to have data integerity then you need to use someting like ZFS (Filesystem that Sun created on Solaris and is also ported to FreeBSD) in addition to RAID, which will ensure that the data read back matches what was written else will indicate an error. If one only uses RAID and there is a bit switch on a disk block or another data corrupting error but the block can be sucesfully read then no error will be thrown and the server will read back whatever garbage the RAID combining algorthim produces from the good and bad data.

because i am a cheap ass i use 4 hard drives in our main server 2 for 1 RAID and 2 for 0 RAID; you can buy controller cards that work better just don't feel like dishing out the extra money for them.

if you dont know what RAID is then you don't use it! i would let it install (need motherboard driver CD/DVD) just so you stop getting those pop ups.

If you don't mind the message jsut leave it, no reason to install the RAID driver and take up system memory or have one more driver that might create problems.


Nenaa

[Iane_Blaidd]

 Level 0+1 -- A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.

 Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

 Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.

so i did mix them up 0 = Stripped and 1= Mirroring

only listed these 3 becuse most people don't have controller cards in their personal PC's.

We use the Array in case of drive failure; we of course have 3 back up systems
1. external drives
2. Filesanywhere (stores the realy important utilties and reports for clients)
3. secure data storage site that stores the data off site we pay about $200 a year for the service

[EggbornHatchedrotten]

So, from what I gather it is kind of like the pipe that ends up going away in my cars after about eight years of ownership that helps protect the environment, but makes my gas mileage worse. For that. I put some black electrical tape on the service engine soon light. I'll try that on my monitor. haha

[Iane_Blaidd]

So, from what I gather it is kind of like the pipe that ends up going away in my cars after about eight years of ownership that helps protect the environment, but makes my gas mileage worse. For that. I put some black electrical tape on the service engine soon light. I'll try that on my monitor. haha

LOL yeah something like that

[Chakkorisi]

You ladies are SOOO sexy with all this geek-speak

Chakk

[Ralamdar]

i think someone just got a hard on