« Today in Tech; 3/6 | Main | Today in Tech; 3/7 »
Why two disks may not be better than one
By Paul Venezia | March 6, 2007, 9:25 am
Well, not the disks themselves. Actually, I get kinda giddy thinking about 1TB 3.5″ SATA drives, but that’s beside the point. With the obvious goal of “bigger better faster more”, many consumer storage vendors are trotting out two-disk RAID0 disks, like Oliver’s IOmega StorCenter. They’re pushed as centralized storage for pictures, video, music, and so on, and commonly store completely irreplaceable data of a human nature, not a commercial venture. To me, that makes this worse since they’re patently unreliable, and marketed to people who have no clue what RAID0 is, nor have any capacity for backing up data to tape or other medium.
The multi-disk solutions that have, say, two 500GB SATA drives and stripe them in a RAID0 for a 1TB volume are twice as likely to fail as a single disk. Why? Because even though it says “RAID” in there, it’s a non-parity stripe. This means that if either drive fails, the data on both drives will be gone forever. And of course, the common notion that there are only two kinds of hard drives — ones that have failed and ones that are about to fail — holds that this will happen sooner rather than later.
The consumer market is pushing digital cameras that are creating 3-4 megabyte photos, enormous video clips, downloaded movies, high bit-rate music, and so on. This drives the storage market, obviously. In order to increase the storage per device, many vendors are striping two disks with RAID0 and marketing it by emphasizing RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Except RAID0 sure as hell isn’t redundant.
Even Oliver seems to have forgotten this: “I decided to do the long-term with Iomega because they had that two-disk striping layer of reliability.” So how the hell is someone like my Mom supposed to know the difference?
It’s really simple — shipping any multi-disk storage device or computer with a default of RAID0 is ethically bankrupt. Devices like these that only support RAID0 and not RAID1 (mirroring, which is redundant) should ship with the equivalent of the Surgeon General’s warning.
“WARNING: Studies show that the use of this storage device for any important data will result in significant mental anguish, rending of clothes, and uttering of curse words, and may cause premature hair loss, sexual dysfunction, and the Grippe.”
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
Topics: Consumer Gear, Storage hardware |
4 Responses to “Why two disks may not be better than one”
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Yeah, a Raid 0 drive config is great for enthusiasts, but it screams for disaster in a business setup.
Unless you want to go with a Raid 0+1
March 6th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I would argue that RAID0 isn’t good for anyone, especially a consumer who has no idea what RAID is. RAID0 has a very limited place — for instance, I built an NNTP server with 16 4.3GB SCSI drives in a RAID0 stripe back in the day, but it was a news spool; if it went away, it would be back the next day. It’s certainly fast, but that’s it.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Yes, I agree with you, but for gamers who knows about their stuff and want some major disk performance on their box, I think the risk is worth the gain. Who cares anyway if there’s no critical data saved on the disk?
The raid 0 setup has to be configured by the person himself though.. Like you already said, having this kind of disk configuration pre-configured isn’t really a good idea.
K,
March 6th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
For me it’s a mix. I picked the StorCenter because it had striping–at least. The WD had shit. Just a disk in a box. So in that sense the Iomega was the better choice.
But I did ask them why they didn’t do a RAID 1 config so I at least could have swapped a disk. Their response was a hem haw, but mainly it was because they wouldn’t be able to call it a 500GB disk if they did that. Plus, the case is sealed–which REALLY sucks. Couldn’t replace a disk on that if I wanted to.
But the problem that’s happening now doesn’t even seem to be disk related, so I guess the point is moot.