Benefits of a raid controller

I was at a Microcenter buying parts for a computer I'm building for my dad and i over herd a tech guy telling someone about RAID systems. The jist of it was that if you have a RAID system and your mobo fries that if you don't replace it with the same exact board that you've lost all your data. He then said that if you have a RAID controller that all u have to do if it fries is swap it out and your fine.
My question is, is that true. and is that also true for a raid1 setup?
I need to know this seeing how I'm building another computer for my dad and he wants a RAID1 setup.

Once again. Thanks.

and yes i googled it and found nothing pertaining to what i wanted. I wouldn't wast anyones time.

---

Reality has become a commodity.

I don't think you need the same exact RAID controller.

If you're setting up RAID 1, in any case, you should be in good shape, since the second drive is a 1:1 backup of the first drive.

All the RAID configurations have a standard. But what is true, is that if you have a set up, like, 0 or 0+1 or something that isn't heavy on redundancy, then if one drive goes down, the whole thing is shot.

Also, keep in mind that it's far more likely that your HDD crashes and burns long before your motherboard components.

Does your dad have to have RAID 1? Or just he just want it? If it's the latter, you might want to persuade him to use something else.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Thank you Crono.

I think i might have sounded a little to enthuseastic when i told him what a RAID system was. He wants it but i know he doesn't need it. I think i'll just stick with one drive and not tell him. He'll never know.

How often to any of u get a hdd that dies on u?

---

Reality has become a commodity.

Never happened to me before but has happened to my brother.

---

Aaron's Stuff

In my experience they last two (Fujitsu) to five (Seagate) years before dying, usually.

---

"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Fujitsu drives are like the worst drives on the planet.

I've seen those fail many times, I've had many older Western Digital drives fail. A couple years ago I even had an IBM drive fail.

Honestly, when looking at an HDD, a pretty good indication of the "life time" of the drive is it's warranty.

Get him like a 700GB drive and he'll never know the difference. (They're not too expensive now).

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I had a SATA drive burn out on me due to an electrical storm. It was hooked up to a battery surge protector, but the other SATA also hooked up in the same system was fine. I was told to get an IDE for my main drive. There's not much speed difference, and their more reliable for surviving an electrical storm and any electrical problem, or am I hearing BS?

btw, I got the IDE and haven't had problems since :biggrin:

---

Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Sounds like BS. Also, while the drives themselves are probably going at the same speed, the controller chips aren't. Average "PATA" can only deliver information at about 133MB/s while Average SATA can deliver it at 3 GB/s. It might be bits instead of bytes, but it doesn't really matter for explaining this: Sata is much faster.

The only down side seems to be that SATA drives, generally, have flakier firmware and more compatibility issues that users need to be aware of.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.