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RAID!

#220 | 20:01 |

Lab Rats

Monday May 3, 2010

RAID gets a bad rap for being too geeky and niche. It's an awesome technology for either speeding up your computer drives, creating a redundancy or both, and now it's getting a lot more consumer friendly too. Sean and Andy revisit the world of RAID (also known as Redundant Array of Independent Disks), explain what it is, and talk about the differences between the major consumer-friendly versions of RAID.

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Show Notes

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RAID: Redundant Array Of Independent Disks. RAID allows for redundancy for digital storage needs. See a description of the various RAID levels at labratsonline.com/raid-levels.

RAID 0 (aka "striped disks) spreads data evenly between disks and creates one large volume.

RAID 1 (aka "mirrored disks" creates an exact copy of disk 1 onto disk 2. To be clear, it's putting the same information on both drives.

RAID 5 (aka "striping with parity") spreads both data and error correction across all disks in the array.

We have only four drives in our configuration here, but you can have many more than that in RAID 5.

In software RAID, the computer's operating system would control what data was where on the RAID drives. In this case, if a single drive fails, all your data is lost.

The larger volume would be two times the size of the smallest drive.

LaCie 4big Quadra 4 terabyte = $769 US.

Drobo - beyond RAID technology enabled. Watch butterscotch.com for our upcoming Drobo review.

The wild and woolly truth about NAS: labratsonline.com/SheepNAS.

We heart Cali Lewis.

Check out episode 8 of Lab Rats, when Andy demonstrates RAID using sandwiches, labratsonline.com/ep8.

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