Raid Configuration

[pillai]

hai all
I have 3*9.1Gb SCSI HDD,if I configured RAID 5 with this HDD.Howmuch GB is available for partitioning.
Means when we create logical drive it show only 17852MB .Is this is correct or wrong.How we configure software RAID and also hardware RAID.what is the different between them.

tHANKX.

 

[Nodsu]

RAID 5 means one drive worth of space is lost to parity information. ~18GB is exactly what you get out of a three-drive RAID 5 array if your drives are 9.1GB

Hardware RAID means that a RAID controller chip presents the logical drives to operating systems as physical drives. You configure this kind of thing inside RAID BIOS or some special RAID setup utility.

Software RAID means that the operating system sees the physical drives and combines them into logical drives by itself.

There is also the "fakeraid" that looks just like hardware RAID, only that there is no controller chip and all the work is done by the system CPU and the RAID drivers. That's what is found on modern desktop motherboards. Since you are using SCSI, you don't have to worry about this awful thing.