Ready to set up a new RaQ 550 with 2x80 GB HD's.

Re: striping (Raid 0) vs. mirroring (Raid 1):

1. What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?
2. What are most folks using?
3. Am I correct to assume that striping gives faster performance than mirroring?
4. Does mirroring become problematic when 1 drive starts to have problems or failing and the other is trying to mirror?
5. With striping, if 1 drive fails, does affect all data across both drives?

thnx! Manny

I could be wrong(I am not up on my Raid) but I thought that Raid 0 essentially combined all the drives, with no protection, while Raid 1 was the lowest level of protection against hardware failures with the mirrored data.

There you can find more information on RAID:
http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/tips/raid/RAID-INDEX.html

I think most people use RAID 1 because it protects your appliance better against data loss if one HDD fails.

Striping spreads data across two disks. Yes, it can improve performance, but if one disk fails, you lose two disks of data.

Not sure on a raq, but a failed mirror only gives a real problem if the broken part is the disk you boot from. You'll need to set up the second disk as the main one.

But heck, I'm no expert on Raq raid stuff

with striping you get much better performance and twice the drive space, but its very risky which is why there is raid 5 (striping and mirroring) - mirroring is just that, both drives are identical, get the same pieces of data... striping is risky if you dont do level5 and is definitely not advised in a production environment...

RAID 0 can be dangerous - if either drive fails, you will lose all your data. You gain marginal performance increase with 2 spindles, but IMO the risk isn't worth it.

With RAID 1, if either disk fails, the system will operate normally off the other one until you can replace the dead drive. Then it will auto-mirror to that new drive.

there is raid 5 (striping and mirroring)

Raid 0+1 provides striping and mirroring also, but instead of using 3 drives, it uses 4. This was an option I had on my PC when I had the RAID board in it.

Also, I don't know if this is relevant to RAQ or not, but with the board I had, if it was configured to Raid 0, any BIOS upgrades would wipe out the entire Raid and require it to be rebuilt. Raid 1 would just re-mirror if the BIOS was upgraded.

I guess it comes down to what's important to you. Performance or the backup.