Hi, everyone.
What the storage capacity of yours now?
Mine is 120+200+160+13=493GB for the moment, and no RAID i'm afraid to say.

Do you guys use RAID systems??
since someday i'm going to need one eventually, i think i'll just ask what do you guys feel about it, and which company would you choose...

thx

Company...for what? And if you have even have as much data as capacity there, you need RAID or backups. It only doubles the HDD cost.

I use dual 40GB Western Digital (not because i perferred them, but because they were damn cheap) harddrives in a RAID0 array, i believe. Had them for two years, havent had a single problem.

Well, just for safety, you know...
making RAID 5+0
seems to be having both efficiency and safety.

yes, of course, i can back data up to dvds.
but who knows...
dvd's quality is really hard to control...

nothing is secure these days...

Er, for the company, it depends on the OS and type of drives used. If ATA...no card is needed for RAID 1,1,10,0+1, so no choice. If SCSI, I'd probably go with LSI.

RAID 5 is nice, but adds a good bit to cost if you want it in hardware (if you want to write at decent speeds, you want hardware...a duron 800 could just manage 6MB/s writes in software RAID 5). My dad had this goig for his file server for a couple years, but it ended up being more trouble than it was worth, and the newer RAID 1 arrays (the server has gone through several linux distros now) have been fine.

RAID 1 is simple, effective, and easy to do in software, with no tangible performance loss. It is even easier if you have a non-RAID boot drive and RAID data drives. Software RAID also has the benefit of being able to be read by just about any machine, provided the filesystem used can be read by that machine. This gets iffy when you get into using real hardware RAID controllers.

40 + 80 + 300 = 420 GB

What is your 13gig drive davince?

it's a very very old seagate drive.

i use it as my bittorrent downloading temp drive right now.

And i use my 200GB drive as the main storage part..
i try not to use bittorrent or emule these kind of p2p softwares on it.

and the 160 drive i'm considering making it my multimedia storage drive, i think i'll put all my movies and musics in it.

i'll use emule on the 120GB drive sometimes, it's the os one, too.

120Gb Seagate SATA and 80Gb dying Maxtor PATA

Cool!!
I though about SATA once...
but just unable to use it...

Are RAID Arrays faster than SATAs?

N/A.
RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

RAID 0 (named such partly for not being redundant) stripes drives together. So half of a file is on one drive, half on the other. Read and write speeds, even in software RAID, are near doubled. However, it offers almost no tangible benefit to normal use, as seek times become that of the slower drive. Let's say drive A and B are identical, with average seek times of 10ms. If drive A takes 8ms for a part of a file, but drive B takes 12ms...that's 12ms for the whole thing.

RAID 1 mirrors drives. So if you have identical drive A and B, you get one drive's capacity, but if the drive fails, you've got everything on that drive in perfect condition, just waiting for a replacement drive to be put in place (at which point, it will be made a mirror again).

RAID 5 spreads information out, with a small piece of the data on each drive, requiring three drives. Unlike others, this RAID level takes a lot of calculation power (believe me, you want hardware RAID for this). The benefit is that you get all but one drive's worth of storage (so 4 160GB drives gives you 480GB space), with one drive of fault tolerance. RAID 5 can have astounding read speeds (outdoing RAID 0 on some controllers), but will always have slow write speeds, simply due to having more transactions with each drive for every write.

RAID 10 and 0+1 stripe and mirror drives, requiring four drives. Half are striped, half are mirrors of the stripe. You get half the space (RAID 1 is 1 drive...if you had 6 in RAID 1, you still only have 1 drive's capacity--and most controllers won't do more than a two-drive RAID 1 anyway), but both the redundancy benefits of RAID 1, and the speed benefits of RAID 0. Databases really like RAID 10. nVidia and Intel now have a special 2-drive RAID 10 in their new chipsets (nVidia RAID and Matrix RAID), which, IIRC, puts RAID 0's part A and B on a single drive, so while reading and writing normally, you get the striping, but a single drive can also be used to rebuild, should the other fail. It mainly exists because two SATA devices is the current norm.

There are RAID levels 2,3,4,6, and 12 also, but they are very uncommon.

PATA (P retrofitted to ATA for parallel), SATA, and SCSI are just physical and software protocols for talking to the drives and controllers--RAID is a method of setting drives up to improve speed/or and redundancy. As the son of a sysadmin, I must also add the disclaimer: RAID 0 is bad for data.

Sorry, i got a bit confused there. How much faster is SATA transfer speeds than ATA133, i believe i meant to ask.

500GB - LaCie Big Disk.
80GB - PowerBook G4.
40GB - Dell Laptop.
10GB - Encrypted external FireWire backup disk.
4GB - iPod mini.
1GB - Kingston DataTraveler Elite USB Pen.

Total 635GB.

120GB 7200 MAXTOR PATA and 40GB 7200 MAXTOR PATA. The 120GB very recently replaced a 40GB 5400 Toshiba which I may stick in an external case.

If and when I ever upgrade it will be to RAID 1 SATA (I hope).

At work I have RAID 5 using 120GB SATA drives.

I would like a 250GB external hard drive to store my CD backups on (currently stored on 26 DVDs), so I can easily transcode to lossy format, check for errors, etc. I don't relish having to go through 20-30 DVDs when it comes to checking my backup in the summer. Hopefully some time in 2005 (it's my birthday Feb 28th if you all want to start saving)...

Edit: (after seeing above). I also have a 32MB Netac USB Pen which I love. I did have a 256MB USB MP3 player but files corrupted 50% of the time, which made it useless. The Netac has been solid. I wish it was 128MB or 256MB sometimes, but it's generally fine for transporting files to and from work.

2 x 160GB SATA (Seagate Barracuda 7200 with 8MB cache) in RAID-0 array

SATA in it's current form has 150 MB/s transfer rate. But of course that's only maxed out if data is read from the HD cache. Transfers from the HD itself can barely reach half of that speed with modern drives. SATA II will have 300 MB/s transfer rate.

But SATA has more important advantages than the peak speed increase. Read this rather old, yet excellent article: Serial ATA and the 7 Deadly Sins Of Parallel ATA.

Inside the case of my main computer:
120 GB Seagate barracuda sata
external USB drives
160 GB Maxtor (Lacie enclosure)
160 GB Western Digital Caviar (Olidata enclosure)

and
20 Gb Toshiba in my iHp 120 player

80 GB in workstation, 40 GB on server, 6 GB on laptop, 512 MB on Palm Tungsten T3 and 64 MB on USB key disk

It's not much space, but I don't need more than that. I'm not a collector. I delete movies once I've seen them. If I liked the movie, I buy the DVD. The same goes for music.

In short, I clean up my harddrive regularly, so I'm doing just fine with what I have.

My next storage upgrade is going to be a RAID 1 or 5 system. I haven't decided yet.

Also... RAID 0 isn't RAID by definition, since it isn't redundant. It doesn't really offer any real speed advantages either, so it's just gambling with your data.

120, 160, and I just upped my RAID0 to 2x250. DVDs are painfully small by comparison, each one taking only a nibble of data. Also, I contend that RAID0 does offer a speed increase. You should at least be able to increase the pitifully slow media access rate.

I have a question..
Do you make partitions within RAID or big HDD whose capacity is more than 200GB?
i'm considering whether i should make partitions for my 200GB or not.....
but i'm really afraid that if i make partitions...someday i might have total files size exceed the partition size......

Any advantages and disadvantages of not making partitions on big hard drives?

(i feel my English is kind of silly, so i just apologize first...)

<5%

No, except that it can be confusing.Best to just make the RAID data-only and have directories for organization. Partitions really aren't that useful, unless necessary (as they will often be for *n*xes).