Question about internal hard drives
Cameron Simpson
cs at zip.com.au
Thu Nov 19 18:43:40 UTC 2009
On 19Nov2009 15:31, Kevin O'Neil <kevin at kevinslair.com> wrote:
| I have a question. Is it better to have multiple hard drives or will
| just one be ok?
Speaking as someone recovering from some data loss right now, multiple
drives is better.
| I have a box that can have up to 2T...should I use two 1T or 4 500Gb?
That's a funny limit. Why 2TB? Or do you mean the max partition size is
2TB, courtesy of the horrible DOS partition format?
People will probably recommend 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration, but
at home we've just migrated to a policy of 2 drives in RAID 1 (mirror)
configuration.
RAID 1 is less efficient in terms of space: RAID 5 will "waste" one
drive of parity data, thus 1/4 of your drive space while RAID 1 will
waste 1/2 your drive space.
HOWEVER, with RAID 1 either drive is usable on its own. With RAID 5 you
need at least three drives (n-1) drives.
So if you have the money, I'd use RAID 1. It is simpler and in some ways
more flexible.
Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
When you say `I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at
you blankly and say `Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'.
- Linus Torvalds
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