Chances of Raid 0 failing

S

Skytbest

New Member
So Im looking at buying this laptop and I noticed that it had an extra hard drive bay, my first question is would this hard drive work in there? Second question is, can I do a raid 0 configuration with them? And lastly what are the chances of a hard drive failure? I know they are pretty small, and they double when you do Raid 0, but what are the approximate numbers? Does the fact that its a laptop, and the two drives may draw a lot of power increase those numbers at all?

Thank you.
 
I don't see anything about an extra drive bay but if it's there that drive should be fine.

As for the actual chances for failure, I don't know. I can't find the mtbf for the drive. I saw a study (http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html) that claimed drives with a MTBF between 1 million to 1.5 million hours should mean an annual failure rates of 0.88%. However the study said that actual annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%. Keep in mind drives with a MTBF of 1 million+ hours are enterprise drives not consumer drives you get for your desktop/laptop.
 
Skytbest said:
So Im looking at buying this laptop and I noticed that it had an extra hard drive bay, my first question is would this hard drive work in there? Second question is, can I do a raid 0 configuration with them? And lastly what are the chances of a hard drive failure? I know they are pretty small, and they double when you do Raid 0, but what are the approximate numbers? Does the fact that its a laptop, and the two drives may draw a lot of power increase those numbers at all?

Thank you.
Click to expand...

Where are you getting the extra hard drive bay information from? I didn't think the Gateway P-series (or any Gateway laptop) had support for dual internal drives. Are you thinking of the eSATA port? If so, that is an external port, not an internal one.

Also, the power draw on the laptop has nothing to do with the drive failure.
 
You can't run a RAID 0 configuration on that laptop. No RAID controller.
Click to expand...
Oops, I didn't check for that. I just assumed that they were asking so it must be there.
but you could possibly run a software raid of external disks...I suppose
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure software RAID in Windows XP only puts a small load on the CPU so the increased power usage would be mostly limited to the extra drives but the more I look at it the more RAID on a laptop seems silly enough without throwing software RAID into the mix.
 
Right, as Tlarkin said, you could run a software RAID array, and that would only be on external drives if you were going to use Windows. Windows itself cannot be installed and boot from a software RAID 0 array.
 
I have an HP with 2 bays--I tried moving the operating system drive on the second bay, and the laptop would not see it. The manufacture of these laptop can give you a good idea as to why these 2 bays are there and how you can configure them in a raid 0 formation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top