[Nottingham] whats the deal with SATA / RAID ?

[Martin Garton]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, chris stones wrote:

> I know raid can be used to make 2 or more identicle hard disks act as 
> one, so if one fails, your data is not destroyed.

That is a description of RAID1 (also called mirrored raid)

> however are there any other uses for RAID ? also, they give 
> specifications like RAID0 / RAID1 / RAID(insert number here)
> whats this all mean ?

RAID0 is striped raid meaning two or more disks appear as one large disk. 
If any disk breaks you lose data.  You get very fast write speeds doing 
this though.  Read speeds in my experiance may be faster and may be slower 
depending on load.

> Also, what is SATA ? can i plug the normal (E)IDE hard drive onto SATA ?
> ive read it improves disk performance, but i can find no explanation as 
> oto how ?

SATA is a partial redesign of ATA at the hardware level. Without going 
onto detail (because I don't understand the detail) it removes some of the 
shortcomings of the old parallel ATA and brings some of the nice things 
SCSI users have been used to for years.

-- 
Martin.