RAID
technology can provide you the ideal SCSI storage devices
I
used to think a RAID system was only for Fortune 500 companies or
giant graphics studios in New York. But then I found out that you
can easily and economically create your own RAID system in your
own office, even if you are in the Unfortunate Hundred Million.
We are testing Seagate Cheetah Ultra2 SCSI disks as a RAID disk
array. Our initial review is positive. We recommend a RAID, now
that the hardware prices have dropped and the RAID system software
can be configured on your own in a few minutes.
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Here
is our RAID system. 36 GB (two 18 GB Seagate Cheetah Ultra2
SCSI disks). We now recommend Quantum, as we have found
them more reliable than Seagate Cheetah disks.
Random
Array of Inexpensive Disks is one way to look at it (or
Random Array of Independent Disks). A RAID array system
is simply a stack of two or more disk drives coupled together.
Rather basic and easy to arrange, just put one hard drive
on top of the other, load your software, and you now have
your own RAID system.
Here is the easy software, on the diskette (I wanted Level
0 for faster movement of large digital files).
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Better
Light large format digital camera produces immense files
(300 and 400 MB per single photograph). If produce digital
photographs of this professional size you need to upgrade
to a professional storage system, namely a RAID array of disks. |
I
felt more secure having someone hold my hand as I installed
the RAID software, so a technician did it over the phone.
It took 7 minutes (our Mac has 800 MB of RAM so it takes a
while to turn on for the restart needed after installing new
software). |
Easy, economical, and fast. You can have your
own personal RAID array system on your own desk, or build RAID systems
for your entire office. RAID provides you with all the storage devices
that you need.
You
can also opt for a hardware RAID. ProDirect can answer your questions
and fix you up with whatever size RAID you need. You can expand
your RAID in the future, as your business grows.
For
a RAID system all you need are two identical hard drives, any two,
but same make, model, and speed. The two drives are (electronically)
merged as a single drive, and appear as a single drive on your desktop.
You get double the speed since each drive is sucking the data in
or out. If you add more drives, you get more capacity.
If
you want redundancy, you can add more drives and elect a higher
RAID mode (a higher RAID number). This way, if any one drive fails
then your other drives have the same data and recreate the full
archive.
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FLAAR offers for you more information about this subject |
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