Guest anon Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 Am looking to buy an extra HD, whats the difference between these two, they both say 160GB but the second says 2x 160, what exactly does that mean? 160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurstTM cache 160GB Serial ATA RAID 1 Mirror [2x160GB 7200rpm drives with DataBurstTM cache Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 the second one is two hard drives, setup to be in a RAID array. The second drive mirrors the first one, so that if there's an error with the first it will read the data off the second. do a google on RAID 1 and you'll find information on how exactly it works. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 OK, i understand that bit. But it says 2x 160 which = 320,??????? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 The first is one HD (160GB big) The second one is actually 2 HD in RAID 1 (so also 160GB) SATA is the new standard (compared to the old PATA (IDE) so that is pretty good. RAID is a system of combining HD in such a manner to gain speed, backup, protection against data loss etc etc (there are 5 different combinations). RAID1 means that data on both HD are exactly the same so that when one dies you can just pop in a new one to replace the damged one without data loss. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 yeah, it's two 160gb drives. you only have 160gb of drive space since they are setup in a RAID 1 array. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 yeah, it's two 160gb drives. you only have 160gb of drive space since they are setup in a RAID 1 array. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yea, this what i can't get my head around. So you have 160 GB of space, but you have two x160 GB drives,??? SO can you store 160 GB of data, or 320? If the second drive just mirrors or backs up the first drive, does this mean you can never store additional data on it? Wouldn't this be like installing two drives and running a cron job to sync both drives, or are there other benifits? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 You have 2 drives (prefarable the same size). On each drive exactly the same data is written. So effectively the 320GB of the combined drives comes down to 160GB (2x mirrored data 160GB) The reason why you would want something like that for protection of your data. If one drive dies the data is still on the other drive. You pop in a new drive for the damaged one and you're ready to go. But of course you can have 2 SATA drives not in RAID1 and then you would have 320GB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 But of course you can have 2 SATA drives not in RAID1 and then you would have 320GB. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Which would give you more control on what data you choose to back up or mirror, and also give you the option of using that second drive for storing additional data if you wanted to, yes? OK, i understand now. Thanks for the explanation . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 Yes, just make sure the mobo has 2 sata ports. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 22, 2004 Report Share Posted August 22, 2004 Yes, just make sure the mobo has 2 sata ports. :) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted August 23, 2004 Report Share Posted August 23, 2004 RAID is really best in a server situation, so that you don't have any downtime if a hard drive crashes while you're not there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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