Hard drives and printer Inks!

Airwolf1

Hi,

Just after a bit of advice really.

What is the difference between a 1TB serial ATA/100 hard drive and a 1TB Dual Hard drive raid 0 "stripe" (2x500GB). What are the benefits or features of one against the other?

One of my printers is an HP 2350 all in one. On 1 website (where genuine HP ink is the cheapest I've seen), it says HP Inkjet Cartridge 338 or HP Ink cartridge 338. Are these the same? There is £0.40 difference in the 2 (both black and both genuine HP products).

Thank you :-)

basmic

To answer your harddrive question - RAID 0 is when you need fast harddrive performance, and two harddrives provide much more speed than one.

However, if one drives within the RAID 0 array (array being a set of drives - ie: 4x 250gb, 3x 320gb, 2x 500gb) fails, then you've lost all the data within that array.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html - explains things much better!

There are number of different RAID levels:

• Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
• Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
• Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
• Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
• Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
• Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
• Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
• Level 0+1 -- A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
• Level 10 -- A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
• Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
• RAID S: (also called Parity RAID) EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems.

Airwolf1

Thank you, so, what would people recommend?

kwikbreaks

I'd recommend you make your choice based on what you need.

A single disk solution is going to be a lot cheaper and for RAID 0 less likely to fail.

I personally use a network based RAID 1 setup for my data as it reduces considerably the need for backups but it cost me £270 for 1TB of space and, being network based, only runs at about 13MBps. A single SATA drive in one of the PCs runs miles faster and cost one hell of a lot less but data on it needs regular backups.

You pays your money and takes your choice.

totalsolutions

Raid 5 is the one to go for 3x the cost for three drives (min) + a controller card.
The 1TB drive will fail, so plan a backup strategy to another 1TB unit, or two 500GB drives or 1TB and smaller data backup external drive?

amcluesent

RAID of any sort is not a back-up solution. You should keep copies of critical data off-site.

andy2004

Airwolf1 wrote: »

Hi,

Just after a bit of advice really.

What is the difference between a 1TB serial ATA/100 hard drive and a 1TB Dual Hard drive raid 0 "stripe" (2x500GB). What are the benefits or features of one against the other?

One of my printers is an HP 2350 all in one. On 1 website (where genuine HP ink is the cheapest I've seen), it says HP Inkjet Cartridge 338 or HP Ink cartridge 338. Are these the same? There is £0.40 difference in the 2 (both black and both genuine HP products).

Thank you :-)

the difference is 1 is a single hard drive being 1tb in size 931gb formatted not 1000gb this is standard with hard drives, whereas the other is 2x500gb harddrives. therefore take twice as much room, twice as much power. personally never used raid, i just use my harddrives individually. remember to back up your important data,
if it where me I would just buy a 1tb and forget about it, or 2x1tb and keep 2 copies of files 1 on each drive. Then if 1 goes you always have a 2nd copy, replace the one that stopped working and make another copy, alternatively, burn to dvd.
I like the samsung 1tb drives, quiet, cool and have a 3 year warranty.
a serial ata = SATA is either 150/300MB per sec, depending on whether you have a sata1 or sata2 speed connection, thats the motherboard not the socket. the connection on the drive is the same for both. sata 1 = 150mb, sata 2 = 300. usually hard drives have jumper pin on the drive to make the sata 150,