Re: Workstation in 50 K suggestions please :
fiazio said:
No I haven't, do you have any suggestions ?
I am not sure if you are aware of different kinds of Raid solutions.
If you are planning to use Windows XP Pro it has an option to set up Software Raid solution.
Raid is basically a solution to provide redundancy to your data in case there is a data loss caused by system crash due to power failure, bad blocks on disk or disk failure etc. I would give you an example of 2 forms of Raid to help you understand better.
Raid 1 - Which is also known as Mirroring.
It helps create an exact copy of your first disk on to the second disk. To be able to setup Raid 1 you require 2 disks in your system with same capacity. In the event there is a failure or crash of the OS on the first disk or say your first disk develops bad blocks and renders your system in no boot then you can utilize the second disk which was part of Raid 1 and is an exact clone of your first disk data to boot back to the OS.
Raid 5 - Requires more then 2 disk or you can say 3 disk to setup Raid 5.
Raid 5 is basically also known as Stripped with Parity. The data is written across the three disks hence called stripped. Every disk saves parity information of the other disk. This parity information helps to rebuild the data of a failed disk. If a disk from Raid 5 fails, you simply need to replace that failed disk with a new same capacity disk and the data on this replaced disk would get regenerated with help of parity information on the rest of the 2 disks.
Hence you have redundancy when your disk fails. There are several other kinds of raid but the above 2 are the most popular ones.
Now Raid has 2 implementations
1. Software Raid - The one created with help from OS is called software RAID. In case of XP Pro, Windows 2003 its done from disk management console(Start>Run>diskmgmt.msc)
2. Hardware Raid - The logic to create Raid is built in the motherboard or you buy a separate Raid Controller PCI/PCI-E Card to which you connect your disks. In this the OS is not aware how many disks are in your system. Say for e.g. you have setup Raid 1. The controller card will present the 2 disks as one single disk to the OS if you have configured Raid 1 else it will consider it as 2 different disk & will be presented as 2 disks to the OS. The OS wont understand whats at the hardware level. For the OS its just sees as per what is configured in the Raid Controller Card. All the Raid logic calculations are done by the Controller card.
Now if any one disk fails here. You just shut down the system and replace the failed disk and boot in the BIOS of the Raid Controller card and rebuild/regenerate the RAID. In high end servers you cant afford downtime hence those have the option of hot swap where the disk is just removed from the disk enclosure and replaced while the system is ON and OS is running.
Hardware Raid is the only reliable solution for data. Software Raid is just to save your cost of adding the Raid Controller card.
Now a days most motherboard have built in Raid Controllers. But again performance of this v/s a dedicated Raid Controller card is much lower.
One of them is Asus M4A78T-E Deluxe motherboard.
There might be other cheap boards too that have these built-in.
Hope I have explained you better to help you decide if you are planning to implement RAID.
