Re: RAID

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 08:58:36PM -0800, lordSauron wrote:
> I don't know... I think that the nVidia nForce 3's RAID is on the
> contoller level, so I think it should work, but I'm not sure.

No it is at the BIOS/software driver level.  The BIOS is just software
in rom.  No one yet puts an xor/comparitor engine into generic ide/sata
controllers, since it is much cheaper not to do it and waste cpu cycles
doing raid for the minority of users that want it.

> Yeah, that hit me rather suddenly in the car on the way home... 
> However, I don't have the raw cash to buy anything over about 120Gb.

Well a single 80G or 120G is rather nice.  Raid0 is just not worth it
unless you have enough drives to run raid0 + raid1 (usually 4 drives so
you mirror each pair and then stripe the mirror sets).  Sometimes called
raid10 or raid01 (Depending on the order you do it in stripe mirrors or
mirror the stripes).

Prices I see for disks around where I live (Canada):
80G $67 ($0.83/GB)
160G $90 ($0.56/GB)
200G $105 ($0.52/GB)
250G $123 ($0.49/GB)
320G $167 ($0.52/GB)

So my last drive I got a couple of months ago was a 250G.

Apparently the 40 and 120G drives were discontinued (last I checked the
40G was about $4 less than the 80G, and the 120G was about $5 less than
the 160G.)

I tend to have machines with way more ram and disk space than their
cpu/age would generally warrent.  So Athlon 700 with 768M ram and
2*80G+1*250G disk space, and a 486/66 with 48M ram and 18G disk space.
I always seem to need more disk space and ram than I need cpu power so
that is what I tend to upgrade.

Len Sorensen