You've got me on the new meaning, but I was correct when reffereing to RAID
0 being striped and 1 being mirrored.

taken from whatis.techtarget.com

a.. RAID-0. This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers
the best performance but no fault-tolerance.
b.. RAID-1. This type is also known as disk mirroring and consists of at
least two drives that duplicate the storage of data. There is no striping.
Read performance is improved since either disk can be read at the same time.
Write performance is the same as for single disk storage. RAID-1 provides
the best performance and the best fault-tolerance in a multi-user system.

Speed is what I'm after, and RAID-0 is the answer.  Each drive is only
writing/reading half the data, and at the same time.  Utopia would be 4
drives in RAID 1+0, but that's getting silly budget wise.  With weekly
backups on cd, I don't really need the redundancy anyways.

The full page can be found at
http://whatis.techtarget.com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,214332,00.html

Cheers.

> I believe that you have this wrong.  If I recall, RAID 0 is "mirroring,"
> that is,
> it writes the same data to two different disks.  RAID 1 and RAID 3 use a
> more complicated "striping" mechanism which writes data to several
> disks (five in the hw that I know about) and uses a sort-of "parity."
>
> RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks."  The key word
> here is "Redundant."  This means that more data is stored than is
> actually needed.  The purpose of RAID is not to improve speed, but
> to improve reliability.  Today's better RAID systems can keep on running
> (albeit slower) when one of the (five) disks fails.  You can even do a
> "hot swap,"  that is, replace the failed disk with a new disk without
> shutting down the system.  This is very important to some businesses
> that do not want any downtime.  (The original meaning of RAID was
> as you say "Inexpensive," but that has evolved, sort of like DVD
> no longer means digital video disks.)
>
> RAID 0 is the least sophisticated of the RAID's because it writes to
> two different disks at the same time, thus "wasting" the space on the
> second disk; it represents a 50% ratio of wasted disk, as opposed to
> the 20% ratio when five disks are used with RAID 3.
>
> The most sophisticated systems have a host adapter (in the computer)
> and a disk controller in the raid system.  (This info may be a few years
> out of date.)  I can see that if sophisticated high-speed hardware is
used,
> there will be very little penalty in reading the disks (writing does not
> have
> to go so fast - the critical concern is how fast information can be
> accessed, not how fast it can be written).  However, if you try to emulate
> this in a PC with software, I cannot see how it can not represent a
> performance penalty unless the software replaces the operating system
> disk management functions.  Even then, I do not see an increase
> in performance.
>
> (I have not checked it out, but LSI Logic/SYMBIOS is a major producer of
> RAID
> systems.  I would suspect that their web sit might have info on
> modern RAID systems. )
>
> In conclusion, I believe that if you need reliability then RAID is the
> answer,
> but if you want speed, it will disappoint you.
>
> HTH

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