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Notebooks w/ RAID?

Posted by Cliff on from the fault-tolerance-for-devices-that-really-need-it dept.

macemoneta asks: "Are there any notebooks available on the market that support (bootable) RAID (at least two 40GB+ drives as RAID0 and or RAID1)? While the rest of the components in 'desktop replacement' notebooks are quickly getting up to snuff, the hard drives are anemic in performance, capacity and reliability compared to desktops. Being able to use software RAID to create high performance meta devices and high reliability meta devices would really kick notebooks into high gear. Before anyone complains about size, weight, power and heat remember that notebooks have gone from 12 inch screens to 16 inch screens and 486 to P4M in the last few years. Most desktop replacement laptops use the batteries as a UPS, since they usually only last 90 minutes or less anyway."

7 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. DELL Inspiron 8200 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    DELL's new inspiron with the 64MB Geforce4Go will take two 40 gig drives and can software RAID across them with linux.
    beware of the expense -- its around $7K fully loaded with all options including multiple batteries which you will need if you use both hard drives RAIDed.

  2. laptop drive limits by OpenMind(tm) · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not sure this is a good idea. Laptop drives, even the recent IBM enhanced models, are rated for a much lighter activity cycle than desktop drives. That is, push them as hard and as long as full-size drives , they are likely to fail on you. IBM is trying to fix this to make their 2.5 in drives suitable to blade servers. Still, RAID historically pushes drives hard enough to decrease the time between failures quite a bit. Combine this with drives designed for low load, and you're asking for trouble. I think the recommendation of a firewire external drive was a good one.

    1. Re:laptop drive limits by thejson · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't believe there's any reason to assume that using RAID would push the individual drives any harder than a single disk would be. I think this could be a good thing, especially for mobile desktop users. With RAID in a laptop, there would most likely be at most two disks due to space concerns. This would limit you to RAID 0 or 1. Consider RAID 0/striping: any reading or writing to the drive is split accross both drives, so in theory they should be doing half the work. However if one disk does fail, you're screwed, which is why this isn't a good option for a laptop (technically not even really RAID) Now consider RAID 1/mirroring. Each drive does the same amount of work as one individual drive would. There may be some additional overhead, but the added reliability is well worth it. If one drive fails, which is more likely to happen in a notebook, the problematic hard drive can be replaced without data loss.

  3. Look at the Eurocom 8880 by compwizrd · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Eurocom 8880 has the capability for FOUR hard drives at once

    http://www.eurocom.ca/products/showroom/specs888 .c fm

    Has the capability for two cdroms/dvd-roms/etc at once.

    15.7" screen as well.

    No mention of weight, I suspect you don't wanna know.

    Eurocom has always been a little bit ahead of everyone else on getting things out :)

    I believe the TV tuner option replaces one of the media bays though

  4. Cheaper option by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wow, so many links to expensive hardware. Pick up a used Pismo powerbook (last black one). You can take out the CD drive, and replace it with another laptop drive. Sleds are available from VST, probably find some used ones too. OSX has software RAID-1 built in.

    You could use any of the black line, but the Pismos often had 500MHz G3's.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  5. Side point by macdaddy · · Score: 3, Informative
    I bought an Asus A7V333 with the onboard RAID. Once per minute regular as clock work the load spikes to 30% on top of what's already running. Once a minutes, regular as clockwork. Up and down real quick. Games stall, MPEGs stall, etc... The problem is apparently the RAID. I have 4 120GB WD 8MB cache models. 2 as regular drives. 2 as a stripe on the OEM Promise FastTrack133 builtin controller. If I disable RAID with the jumper, no spike. If I re-enable, regular spike. If I leave enabled and disconnect the 2 striped drives, no spike. It's got to be the RAID. Asus won't return my calls. I guess this means I'll never buy an Asus again and probably never buy a board with onboard RAID again. A buddy of mine blames it on the Via chipsets. Could be.

    That said, I'm not so sure you want to buy anything with onboard RAID. Perhaps you should look at a speedy Firewire drive.

  6. Easily done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Get any laptop that can take 2 HD (Thinkpad would be my preference, install Win2k and setup active directory on both drives. You can then enable Win2k's software RAID, done. Setting up an array with 2.5" drives as been done before. Check out these articles at Tom's hardware
    http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q 1/020301/i ndex.html
    http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/01q3 /010906/ind ex.html

    About "macdaddy" clockwork spike. I would suspect the Promise driver is the problem. Try disabling the RAID controller and run the Win2k software RAID instead.