Raid Stripe 0

[cmptch]

I thought I'd take a few minutes to write about an issue I'd seen about a year ago involving raid. A man (lets call him Bob) brought me his computer that was used as an industrial sewing machine server.

Another local company had set him up with with Raid Stripe 0, arrayed accross 5 hard drives. All the Hard Drives were Identical. He had about 800Gb of sewing patterns that he would have been required to repurchase since he never backed up. (a couple thousand dollars)

Lets Explain RAID 0

All that RAID Stripe 0 does is basically look at multiple hard drives as a single drive. It is mainly used to boost performance in a gaming system, where data loss is acceptable.

The reliablility of the RAID Set is equal to the average drive divided by the number of drives. example: I use two hard drives that are good for two years. I have total data loss after six months.

Here's what I did for Bob:
He was running his drives through an IDE PCI Card, so I connected another hard drive on the onboard IDE Bus. I installed Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) on the new hard drive, and then installed the Linux drivers for the IDE PCI Cards, and was going to use some software to try to rebuild the array. When I rebooted the system, Mandrake rebuilt the array, and made my job easier. As I was baking up the Data, I lost the Array several times, but was able (somehow) to recover all Data uncorrupted. Usually in a recovery like that the data is unusable.

Wikipedia Article

Wikepedia article's Table of Contents

[Spock]

Sounds like you really earned your fee for that one. If you don't mind would you give us an idea of how long the job took and how much you charged? I'm sure my tech students would be very interested.

If you want, we could move this to a Member Only area before you post if you don't want the general public to see it.

[cmptch]

I think the world should know about RAID 0, and It's been, as I said, about a year.

At the time, our rates were 85 an hour for business equipment. I know it was a little more than 1200 dollars, so we must have put in about 15 or so hours on it. two full work days. We tried just about everything before using linux(the boss wouldn't let me.)

The guy brought everything in with his unit, 19inch DVI LCD moniter, the works. After about 3 months of talking to the guy, we ended up keeping/selling his hardware. He just didn't want it anymore.