Thread: Polls galore...

if you pull out more than one drive, you are way up there... with no paddle.

OK - another question - does the RAID actually change those bits to be the AND, or does it just stripe across bits that happen to be the AND? If the former, doesn't that cut available space in half? If the latter, doesn't that take forever (scanning every bit)?

that is just an example... it isn't always bitwise, and rebuilding a drive can take over an hour, but you only need to rebuild a drive if one fails.

When it is operating normally, writes are a little bit slower than a single disk(not really noticible) and reads are enormously fast.

The biggest slowdown in the computer is from external devices to the I/O due to disk latency and other things. If you need 1K of data from one drive, you have to wait for the drive to dump the whole thing. Four of the same speed drives dump the same amount of data in a quarter of the time where it moves as electrons instead of spinning disks and moving heads, etc.

So this is why there is a huge performance gain on reads.

Who said the GD board doesn't teach you anything?

I don't know... let's find em and have Penny kill and eat them

I may be stating the obvious here but, to enable hot swapping (changing hard drives in and out) while a machine is running requires alot more than just a RAID array. You need the proper (and very expensive) hardware, drives, fibre connectors(cool) etc...
I feel I should say this as I don't want someone whipping out one of their Maxtors cause they saw it was in a RAID array and wanted to see how it would cope
hth

LOL... yeah, you need a hot swap drive. Good point.