Raid Drives

just looking to purchase another external FW drive.

i've used Lacie products in the past and have been pleased with their performance.

i was just wondering, does anyone here use RAID drives?

im guessing that is way out of my league, but i was just wondering how they are rated as far as performance goes?

(they are mainly used for better performance and reliability?)

raid 0
will improve performance but half the reliability of the drives
raid 1
depending on the raid controller used will not effect drive performance but provide a mirror in case one drive fails. this scheme fails in the case garage in garbage out or if the raid controller receives corrupted data it will write/read it to both drives w/o detecting any bad

there are other raid situations, network distributed backup etc
read up

RAID is not a brand name of drives which it appears to be thought of after reading your post.

RAID is a way of controlling hard drives to spread out data between them so you can access them faster, or to copy one drive at the same time to multiple drives. This is not a kind of hard drive but a kind of controller.

For example: I have 4 drives that can work independently of each other, if they are all e-sata and fw drives then I can hook them up like this:

FW: all the drives go to a hub, now each drive is its independent drive that can be mounted, dismounted, saved too, etc.

e-sata: Assuming I have a RAID controller in my mac pro, if I hook up the 4 external drives to the RAID controller in my mac pro, then I will be able to dictate how the drives work together. Either 2 drives are real drives where I can save to them, and the other 2 are mirrored, or so that they are striped and the controller spreads the data between the 4 of them for faster access to the data.

RAID was initially designed for redundancy on servers, the idea being that 2 drives acted as one, so that if a physical disk failed, the data was duplicated on its sister drive.

As such there is no performance advantage on a desktop set-up. As long as you have a good back-up system a RAID set-up might be a bit over the top

thanks guys!