If you were up-grading from scratch which system would you go for?

[Floh Peters]

[Ajmetz] “I think my problem is, I hear the word “RAID” and “Array” a lot, and I don’t really know what one is.”

A RAID or Array is a set of drives that are “joined” to give higher data rates. E.g. if you have 2 drives on individual SCSI/SATA/FibreChannel connections and you “stripe” them together as a single RAID 0 volume you get nearly twice the read and write speed you would get from those drives individually. Additionally you can stripe 3 or more drives in a RAID 5 array, which not only gives you quicker read and write speeds but also protection. If one drive in a RAID5 setup fails the data is not lost, since one drive contains “parity” data which allows reconstruction of the original data on the fly. You lose the space (and performance) of one drive, though. So if you