Question: Could you tell me a striped array gains anything by being partitioned?

Answer: First, you're correct about the OS. We recommend in normal use keeping the OS off a striped array. Pure striping has no redundancy so you've just double your chance of a disk crash. Mirroring is another ball game. Many people are now running their OS off of a mirrored array (thanks to the inexpensive cost of IDE drives) so they constantly have a backup.

The partition question is one we get asked a lot. Theoretically you can benefit from partitioning, although ask disk technology continues to improve the speed results truly are negligible. In theory, the drive can access data from the inner portion of the disk platter, meaning that if you partition your drives you can test the partitions and often find one partition faster than the other, i.e. the part of the partition that is using primarily the inner area of the disk. Again, as disk technology improves, however, the speed results of the head moving from the inner to the outer portion of the disk are not quite as dramatic as they have been in the past.

RAID Solutions Volume #1

Question: I have a 40 GB internal drive and another 40 GB drive. My internal 40 GB drive contains my applications, operating system and a few games that I play during lunch. The other 40 GB drive contains mission critical data. What would you recommend I do with your NitroCannon to make sure that I have a good backup and the least amount of downtime possible? With the low cost of IDE drives, purchasing additional drives is not a problem. Oh yeah, I’d like to get bigger drives at some point, too!

Answer: This is a great question. There are two scenarios that I would recommend based on the fact that you a) are willing to buy inexpensive IDE drives and b) would also like to add bigger drives at some point, too.

Create a Mirror Without Using the Boot Drive – Purchase the NitroCannon and install it internally in your PC. Leave your 40 GB internal boot drive on the motherboard. Purchase a second 40 GB drive and mirror the two drives together on the NitroCannon. You say that the data is mission critical, if one drive goes down, you have an immediate backup. Even better is the fact that the NitroCannon can handle a "Hot Spare" meaning that you can remove the bad drive and add another drive to the mirror. By accessing the included configuration utility, you can set the NitroCannon to automatically rebuild the mirror in the background allowing you to continue to write data to the mirror.

The two 40 GB drives now occupy one channel on the NitroCannon card. When you are ready, buy two larger drives and attach them to the second channel on the NitroCannon. Those two new drives can then be mirrored (or striped if you decide you want extra speed!).

Create One Mirror With the Boot Drive – My second suggestion would be to take the two 40 GB drives that you have and mirror the two of them together. Store the mission critical data and the system data on the same drive and mirror the two of them together. By doing this you have a real time backup of both the system data AND the mission critical data. In this scenario you also leave the second channel open if you would like to add larger drives at a later date.

Create Two Mirrors, One With Boot Drive and One With Second Drive – In this scenario you would need to purchase two additional 40 GB drives. Mirror the boot drive on channel one of the NitroCannon, mirror the drive which contains mission critical data on channel two of the NitroCannon. This way you are insured that if either the boot drive or the data drive go down, you’re sure to have a spare.

RAID Solutions Volume #2

Question: I work in a prepress house, would you recommend striping or mirroring for transferring my files?

Answer: I can see why you would ask this question, there are definitely arguments to support either striping or mirroring in the prepress world. Your best bet may be mirroring striped sets, or RAID 0+1. Let me explain.

Typically prepress files include very large graphics and images and can be extremely large, often taking up several hundred megabytes. Striping offers you additional speed. Saving these files to disk can often be a slow process. Mirroring, however, gives you redundancy and lets you know that if something ever happens to your hard drive you have an instant backup.

The typical argument is speed vs. redundancy. Some argue that speed (RAID 0) is king, the quicker you finish project A, the quicker you’ll be working on project B, and by completing more projects you should be able to significantly improve your bottom line. While others take the side of redundancy (RAID 1), more specifically that it is far too risky to spend a significant amount of time on a project without having a real-time backup. Those who take the side of redundancy do not want to have to go through the process of recreating work if for some reason their original file becomes damaged or corrupted in any way.

By implementing a 0+1 strategy with the NitroCannon you are actually getting the best of both worlds, the speed of striping with the redundancy of mirroring. With RAID 0+1, you basically take two drives out of the 4 drives and stripe them. You take the remaining two drives and stripe them as well. You then mirror the stripes, meaning that if one striped set goes awry, you still have a striped set to work with.