Single drive versus RAID1

[Madison Kelly]

RAID 1 will somewhat (slightly) slow write times but this can be largly 
compensated for by putting each drive on seperate controllers. Read 
times can be as much as (theoretically) doubled because reads can happen 
from either drive. Extra cost in the second drive may or may not be an 
issue. Slight increase in CPU usage if you don't use a dedicated RAID 
controller.

All in all, I don't build a server without at least RAID 1. It is a very 
inexpensive way to maintain up-time in the case of a dive failure but 
you are right, it certainly IS NOT a replacement to tape backups.

If you would like, I have the text from a talk on RAID (and IDE/SCSI) 
that I gave to TLUG some time ago that covers a lot of the pros and cons 
to various RAID levels.

Madison

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml