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Is a RAID enclosure merely a place to put your hard drives that are connected to your controller and provide hardware (as opposed to software) RAID? They seem so expensive I was just wondering if that was all that they did.
Also, this product has the following specs:
2.5" Drive Bays 25 x 300 GB 6G 10K SFF Dual-port SAS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816401148
Does that mean it won't support a hard drive whose capacity is >300GB (ex. 450GB SAS) and it won't support hard drives whose rpm is >10k (ex. 15k rpm)?
user784637
Posted 2011-11-10T05:19:53.223
Reputation: 1 365
1They are not all that expensive. You can find 2-disc RAID 1 enclosures online for under $200. – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner – 2011-11-10T05:43:16.353
1What's the purpose of a 2-disc raid 1 controller when you could put it in the computer? (This is not a rhetorical question, I'm really curious what's the purpose of a raid enclosure, esp. one that can only hold 2 disks) – user784637 – 2011-11-10T05:48:39.927
the hardware. night and day differences in hardware on raid. Premo hard raid starts at about $500 for the hardware controller itself only. Get the wrong thing or the cheap thing (often just a controller), and you will join many others who dont understand why it is slow. You got a lot of reasearch to go still. If you want a lot of "hardware" going for your raid, then you want the raid to have its own Dedicated processor, and dedicated memory, plus to check if others found it to be usefull. then you still need a speedy port to connect it with somehow – Psycogeek – 2011-11-10T05:54:43.123
Thanks Psychogeek, however I'm confused how sticking the two discs in a RAID enclosure is actually going to make the read/write faster. I can understand how a controller will impact the speed, but would putting the two discs in a RAID enclosure make the speed faster? – user784637 – 2011-11-10T06:00:36.683
1yes it can, if you forked over $1500 for the setup :-) just generally speaking. otherwise a good controller on the computer and a "tower" case can be better even than an externally connected box. Totally depends on the purpose. if its for storage and Mirrored storage , then maby speed isnt as important. – Psycogeek – 2011-11-10T06:04:51.707
@LedZeppelin: A 2-disc RAID enclosure would only support RAID-1 or RAID-1. Yes, you can get a controller card and do this inside your computer, but sometimes that's not always an option, such as when you don't have another free expansion slot for another card, or no room for extra hard drives, or you want an external NAS that also supports RAID. Why would someone only want a 2-disc RAID? Maybe that's all they need, or maybe that's all they can afford... – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner – 2011-11-10T14:32:05.640