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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."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple drives? by Linux_ho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You would do well to simplify the question by asking if there are notebooks available with multiple hard drives. Lilo can boot to a software raid, so any notebook with two drives can do this. Whether the sound card or built-in ethernet/modem works is a different story, but you didn't mention whether those were important to you.

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  2. Re:laptop drive limits by OpenMind(tm) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm not entirely sure of the full rationale, only that I've come across quite a few references to increased disk loading in raid systems, in addition to plain old working experience. I think the particular stripesize/cylinder size ratio, stripe layout, etc. have a lot to do with how much effect this has. A striped drive tends to end up doing a lot more short reads as compared to long sequential reads. Depending on how well the drive heads are managed (easier to do well in hardware, IMHO) the increased seek activity can generate a lot of wear and tear. This is not as big a deal when using the RAID with large files and a small set of data consumers. Again, this is my non-hardware expert interpretation, but there is a lot of reference in the literature to the shortened life of RAID drives.

  3. Ready for liftoff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    With a 15k rpm drive your notebook will sound like a jet engine, and probably consume about as much fuel...