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Intel and Laptop RAID?
Might E. Mouse writes "The next version of Centrino, codenamed Napa, will support RAID. Intel is pushing it as a great way for business users to have added reliability and data backup on their work notebooks. Should boost gaming performance too. Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array? "
Forgive my ignorance, but why on earth would anyone want RAID on their laptop? If you really need to protect your data, nightly backups should be quite sufficient.
I'd rather an ATi video, but it all sounds good to me. I think in the next 2 years we will be witnessing the death of desktop PC's and replacement with laptops in most circumstances as costs get closer and designs merge.
Funny I was just thinking about this the other day! Wow, I'm getting all excited about LAPTOP RAID NOW.... matt wong
In a workplace environment, you should not trust your users (or their machines) with their own backups. I like the situation at my workplace:
If we're plugged into the corporate network, we have software running that will periodically backup everything you place in your 'My Documents' folder or some other such folder. Users know that if they want something backed up, they put their data there.
Nothing beats proper backup and/or syncing tools and procedure.
I have a Pentium 4M in a Thinkpad.
I have had 2 HD's (non-raid) for a couple years now. One of which is a 7200 RPM drive.
I don't think this would work as a RAID for power reasons. Unless some new battery technology really takes off... how could this be viable? I couldn't imagine if both drives were used at the same time. My laptop is normally plugged in (that's when I use the 2nd HD). But unplugged... it would be a nightmare.
Until nuclear batteries are perfected... this is vaporware in my mind.
It is about time they started putting Raid on Laptops. I don't care about any split second improvement in games but just to be able to have a way to keep the data backed up and running so when mr. Marketing goes to his clients and his drive crashed he is not yelling at you that he couldn't do the presentation and he wont yell at you even more when the project he was working on for 3 months is suddenly gone, and he ignored your requests to backup his data on the network when he has the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...a 10lb. addition because you have 4 disks attached to the bottom of your laptop, and I hope you can strap the battery to your back because its going to go quick spinning more than one drive.
I am, but only if they ship it with a small nuclear reactor to keep it juiced.
Sounds great, but what about battery life? That hing would eat a 6 or 8 cell Li-ion battery for breakfast. Why would a businessman want a laptop that is heavy (2 HDs and bigger battery) low battery life and bulky? Sounds good in theory, but doesnt work - like communism. In summary - that is the laptop for communists.
That's all you need for XviD or DivX and more than you need for older games.
Eventually they'll come to terms with the fact that laptops CANNOT play the newest and greatest games, and they will start releasing laptops that can play strategy/RPGs/Emu's just fine and offer substantially higher battery life.
Transmeta started trying to do this but weren't successful perhaps we'll see it in the coming generations of >$500 laptops.
Maybe laptop RAID would make sense w/ some kind of solid state storage device, but not with laptop HDs. Wouldn't it make more sense just to use a 10K RPM 3.5" hard drive?
Amazing magic tricks
Slow hard drive speeds are one of the chief bottlenecks to performance on laptops. Setting up a RAID 0 configuration would give you some added speed.
Hasn't Falcon-Northwest offered this on their Fragbook line for a while now?
Knightfall
If I needed to backup a laptop, I'd just buy a $30 external USB or Firewire enclosure and a hard drive and look for software that can do incremental backups. Having an additional hard drive inside of laptop spinning all the time only adds more cost, weight, and power consumption..
... a solution in search of a problem.
So basically any power that may have been saved from their new chipsets (IIRC they were better on power consumption) can now be bypassed by adding another hard drive. And with networked docking stations at the company that routinely perform network backups, I wonder how big the target audience is for mobile RAID devices. Pretty soon we'll see notebook computers that are just as big as desktops -- multiple hard drives, huge monitors, etc. I was sitting next to a lady on a flight about a year ago that reached under her seat and after about 5 minutes of thrashing about, pulled out this 17" widescreen notebook that must have weighed about 20 lbs, as when she put it on the "tray table", it looked like it was about to snap from all of the pressure. I'm quite content with my 12" laptop for travel use, as it only weighs about 5 lbs.
Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array
Sure, but that definately depends on battery life. RAIDs are old news, go see Hypersonic. But I wouldn't exactly consider those lugs laptops.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
How many of the people that get these are gonna end up striping their disks instead of mirroring them, thereby negating the entire "data reliability" argument?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
You may be correct, but laptops just aren't reliable. They break far too easily.
My compnay switched from desktops to laptops for everyone, but they have a large IT department to support the repairs. Since our X thousand employees all have 1 of 3 models of laptops, IT has become veyr adapt at rebuilding a working laptop out of the parts of dead laptops.
Now home users don't have that ability. Granted most of them don't repair their desktop either, but the desktop just sits there and doesn't take too much abuse (aside from the odd Coke). Laptops are thrown (yes, thrown) around, and generally banged up. They fail more frequently than desktops and cost twice as much.
So, I don't see deskotps going away for the home consumer. But who knows, they are conventient and retails are often in the mode of "We know what the consumer wants and we'll shove it down their throats."
software raid?
It's easy to setup and only requires access to the media [e.g. P/S ATA, SCSI, USB, whatever].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I saw in some of the postings that people DID NOT like the idea of laptop raid. Well, I'm wondering WHY NOT? Any customer who is likely to care about RAID probably isn't the most mobile user (hence not caring quite as much about batterly life). But, I'm afraid of doing certain things on my laptop for fear of it crapping out or worse, getting stolen. For me DATA redundancy is a MUST.
Additionally, Intel's new chips are supposedly VERY power efficient. If they can make future laptops with RAID sans the power problems... great.
But the real issue is probably COST. If you don't know what RAID is you aren't going to buy it....and its not going to increase cost THAT MUCH. But for those of us who DO know what raid is and either want increased performance or reliability.... there is a market! I don't really like having limited options when I'm making a choice, so having the OPTION of RAID is exactly what I WANTED. --Matt Wong
I have a laptop with RAID right now. Sager has a model or two with Promise Raid support. I don't use it since the second harddrive failed, but I was using it before that in a striped RAID config - it did boost performance a bit.
Since when are there redundant array of inexpensive disk arrays? This is one "uber" multidimensional array.
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
IO on laptops is still one of the worst problems about using a laptop. What good is a 2+ ghz cpu when you have to wait for IO all the time. And with newer laptops having 2 HD's, might as well raid em.
Sure lots of "dont need it" posts today, only downside is battery life.
Screw games, work on some server logs and try to do some statstics, give me faster HD access now. (I upgraded my 5200 to a 7200 HD, night and day difference.)
To increase the reliability of your data backup, you need to move it to a medium that is more stable than the original copies. It also needs to be remote from the original. If you're working on a laptop, having the data striped on your laptop is of hardly any use. Flood, fire, electrical surge, theft, accidental damage will all happily destroy both copies of your data, since they're in the same place.
Now where would I like to see a laptop raid? In a mobile media workstation! Video editors, sound guys, they'd love the extra throughput of a raid 0 that fits in their briefcase.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Are future Centrino codenames going to be 'Advance,' 'AutoZone,' or 'Pep Boys'?
RAID in laptops isn't new really. http://www.powernotebooks.com/category.php?catId=2 5#id699
Second, won't this be bad for battery life having a second 4200RPM drive in your notebook? Not to mention weight?
Third, any money says it'll use the onboard memory for its RAID controller or maybe even software RAID, meaning it, like onboard video will slow your computer down.
For an argument for it, lets turn to my former partner:
This doesn't seem to make much sense. In an age of GBe and 10GBe ethernet, wi-max, storage of files across corporate networks over the Internet, why is RAID in a laptop useful?
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
For the gamer (or other individual who would set them to striping instead of mirroring), if one drive has a 20% chance of failing after three years, then two have a 36% chance of failing. It would almost double the likelihood of a castrophic loss!
Plus, I haven't seen a laptop in years that has quick-swappable drives, which you would want on a RAID machine. It is far less useful if you have to send the computer back to Lenovo to get a new drive installed.
Intel has a goal of centralizing functions in their CPUs.
MMX and SSE came in to boost the CPU's multimedia performance, so that people would be less tempted to take an extra, non-intel, chip to do that (for which they failed...).
The Centrino was an all-in-one Intel bundle so that you wouldn't buy somewhere else to get Wifi on your laptop.
Now it's RAID. I'm surprised, though, that they'd consider RAID a big enough market to include it in their chip. Or is it rapidly expanding with home-users?
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
dismal ?
a T42 that normally yields 4.5hrs of productivity will now be more like 3hrs...
good if u're using it as a desktop replacement
for road warriors, might be a bit heavy....
I don't understand it. People buy laptops with desktop graphics cards, hard drives, and sometimes even desktop processors! Then they complain when they get horrible battery life, 15 pound machines, and third degree burns on their laps. Give me a light laptop with 5 hour battery life and I'll take it any day over the latest 3.0GHz "desktop replacement". My PowerBook 12" weighs next to nothing and gets literally 5 hours+ of battery life, even after several years with the same battery. Bah and humbug is what I say to the proponents of overpriced, overpowered desktop replacements!
My Systems
Praytell how RAID in the CPU could boost gaming performance?
Ok, sure, RAID can help the loading times in the game, but they aren't so prevalent compared to the actual gaming time.
Has "gaming performance" become such a catch-phrase?
Or are people so jumpy now that they can't stand the load time at the beginning of the level?
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
No thanks, I'd rather have a 3400+ Turion with a 256mb Mobility Radeon x850 with 2 Gigs DDRAM, courtesy of Athlon, bitch.
Now you can take a drive out of the laptop with a complete copy of all the data, and the user might not even realize it. Just think of the possibilities!
Of course I'm running Linux and AoE on the laptop. Instead of adding the hardware to the laptop, just add the RAID storage via wireless. Now, when I bring up the network my Linux laptop automatically connects to the Coraid storage blades and mounts the RAID locally. I can even dump DVD iso images to the RAID and mount them for video playback. Check them out at www.coraid.com
You can carry multiply 256MB sticks with you [or a CD] and just have alternate sources.
When I give a presentation the slides are on a USB key, a CDR, two different websites and my email account. That way the likelyhood of me showing up with nothing to show is next to nothing.
A second hard disk won't help you if the laptop won't boot. You need copies of the material you can access without the laptop otherwise what's the point?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Now you today have your laptops with them triple screens that unfold, octo Intel P64's, 28 TB of RAM, and a 1 Petabyte RAID array! Jeez, you kids have to work in teams of 3 to move them, and 2 to set up the legs on the bottom!
I laugh once again that everything old is new again! (think 1980's)
So, people this is or may not be a raid solution when running on batteries, but also a dynamic array creation. Once in the office, the docking station with the second hard drive could start building the mirror of the primary hard drive just in case.
If the hard drive crashes, at least you can be up and running by just using the docking station. Data not backed up and of vital importance could be recover in the meantime.
RAID doesn't do a thing for "gaming performance" short of maaaybe loading. If you're swapping to disk you've already lost the battle.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Windows Laptops have a need to be protected from coffee spills, viruses, and general disk errors.
RAID isn't a backup, its a performance tool. It makes a system more resilliant to _a_single_rare_ failure but NOT the majority of data failures. Having a redudant drive just sucks battery life.
RAID is great on a server where the disks are being used a _lot_ where high redudancy is needed becuase downtime is expensive but there still needs to be an offsite backup solution.
If someone is worried (as they should be) they should have an external HD with an automatic backup everynight. If they have a really important buisness meeting they should be carrying an external USB drive, not a second HD.
Speaking of which why doesn't Dell offer an external HD with an auto recovery system? A clean and updated copy of Windows, nightly backups of their applications, documents, and preferences checked against an anti-malware scanner? Something goes wrong, boot into the Dell branded Norton CD and autorecover from the external HD.
This sounds like Intel's Centrino with WiFi, no one cares. All the vendors turned it off and eventually Intel backed off. They show charts of before and after Centrino with WiFi, bleah. WiFi is super proliferated becuase every damn DSL and Cable providers modem comes with WiFi running unsecure by default, on top of those who went and bought routers for it.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
I see that response a lot. "It would take more power! We need to improve battery technology before we move on this..."
I don't know about anyone else, but it is a rare moment indeed that I would use a laptop on battery power for any serious work. Browsing the internet at a coffee shop or something... sure. But serious work requiring concentration? I'm reaching for the power adapter and looking for an outlet.
I think a laptop mirror RAID is a nice idea. When in battery mode, only the main drive stays active and when AC powered, the 2nd drive should come on and start syncing the mirror. This should be 100% hardware implementarion, however and managed in the BIOS under power management. I wouldn't consider anything but mirroring in this fashion on a laptop. Striping or concatenating drives would be a ridiculous waste IMHO.
On a laptop, RAID would improve reliability (mirroring) or performance (striping), not both, since you're not likely to have more than 2 HDs in that little case.
You could say the same thing about all kinds of niche features on today's laptops:
Who needs firewire? I mean, really, if you're going to edit video, why would you do it on a laptop with its miserably small, dim screen, slow internal drives, and short battery life?
Who needs a TV tuner? Why fork over $2,000 for a laptop that can't show a decent picture with a DirecTV tuner or a satellite box, and even then you're looking at a tiny screen? You can get a bigger and better TV for $150 from Wal-Mart.
The answer to all of these questions (and the RAID one) is that more people are ditching desktops for laptops as their primary machines.
Intel's doing the right thing by offering RAID support at the chipset level because it really doesn't cost them much. What if vendors suddenly came out with dramatically better battery life, or hard drives that required less power? We're already seeing smaller hard drives. Intel's just getting their own part of the work out of the way - in business, you never want to be the weak link in the chain.
What's your damage, Heather?
The laptop market right now is all about making things as small as possible. A RAID setup would require a system that is much larger than current offerings to work. IMO, this is more about the server market. Small, low power consumption servers, maybe even fitting two mobos in a single 1u chassis. Such a market obviously exists, but up until very recently, there hasn't been a chipset that could realistically do the job of a server. This is what this product is really about, not the laptop market.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Redundant Array of Inexpensive/ndependent Disks Array.... Wow that is Redundant..
/. Editors to the rescue of editing
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
Redundant Array of Independent Disks Array? Isn't that...um...redundant?
I always figured that RAIDs would become SAN storage servers, because their redundancy sucks power and weighs a lot. While notebooks would carry only a smallish cache for current data, frequently autosync'ed with a RAID over a network. It looks like that strategy is finally being pursued, only by mobile phones which sync to desktops in multiple locations. Is that just more proof that the real development action is in the mobile "phone" sector?
--
make install -not war
Another spinning drive (or more) sucking the life out of my already too puny battery, and adding to the heat that is keeping my nether regions toasty.
Not a good idea at all.
Welcome to the trend towards automation!
Windows XP updates itself, installs updates, and reboots on its own if you don't click in a minutes notice. It also takes over the 'shut down' button and makes it 'shut down and install updates', doing it only at the times where you just need to bolt (there's a bypass option but habit takes over sometimes).
Backups should be scheduled on all corporate laptops for example. Plug them into the Internet and they check if the speed is worthy (broadband) and starts backing up if it hasn't been done in >2 days for example. Process probably takes a matter of minutes to back up just the changes in user data, filing it onto a NAS box for later backup to external storage.
Why is this so complicated? What the user doesn't know about or have to do won't hurt them and will instead help them.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Anything short of 500GB is worthless to me and I'd prefer a terabyte.
Why would you really want this?
So your battery life can drop from 2 hours to 1?
So the laptop can be heavier?
No thanks.
What I'd really like to see is an iPaq with an 80 gig HD in it.
MadOgre.com
Note that this isn't true hardware raid, but actually what's called fake raid based on the ICH6-R chipset. Think of fakeraid like a winmodem but for RAID. Most of the work is done in software, and in practice, linux's software raid is usually faster than fakeraid anyways. Also note that fakeraid doesn't possess the battery-backed write caches that true hardware raid cards have, so you don't get any reliability improvements either.
The only real good (for linux users at least) that comes from this announcement is laptops with space for two drives that allow us to run software raid.
So, you basically want a mobile wireless laptop with an array of redundant arrays of inexpensive disks?
Hello. It's a laptop.
Why would you want RAID on a laptop?
It's like buying a dirt bike and hooking it up to a boat trailer. Maybe you could do it - but why would you want to?
If you need to haul a boat, buy a basic truck - not an SUV which is a car frame that can't handle real loads - not a dirt bike which is all about speed and maneuverability and gas efficiency (power savings are key to laptops and mobile usage).
It's like that silly Toyota truck I saw with Giant Truck Wheels that were bigger than the entire truck itself. Sure, you can do it, but you basically have to admit you're insane in the first place.
Someone needs a clue stick upgrade at Intel.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"But if lightning strikes your laptop, raid might not help much".
If lightning strikes your laptop, you are probably dead, because your laptop won't be outside in bad weather unless you are carrying it.
My game machine has a primary array of 4x 18gb 15k drives in a raid 5. The added speed is well worth the cost.
I was gunna buy one too but I spent all my money on a new LCD display, then I had to fix the ABS system on my car get my new ADSL line installed too!
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
I can understand Intel putting these into their chipsets. I can EVEN understand them putting them into their mobile chipsets, if the desktop will eventually use the Pentium M. What I DONT understand is WHERE IN THE HELL WILL YOU PUT ANOTHER HARD DRIVE?
Hell, to make sure your laptop isnt as heavy as Rosie O'donnell, you have to take into consideration screen size, as well as shuffle around the ideas of internal/external floppy/DVD/George Forman Grill. Now they want to smack another hard drive in there? It already gets hot enough to melt the nylon of my Tighty Whiteys to my happy trail.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
rediculous! battery life will be nil.
$ whatis msft msft: nothing appropriate
just like i'm down for having my testicals burned off by electrical heat from an extra harddrive, and a graphics card. i'd love a laptop that had this kind of power, but i think waiting for a cooler, less power hungry beast is worthwhile. how long will battery life be able to last when it's searing my legs and possibly damaging other components. now if it there was flashdisk RAID with even a modest performance/storage/price ratio I'd be foaming at the mouth.
with RAID! get your very own fusion reactor-powered laptop that weighs in at a measly 25,000 metric tons, suitable for hiking adventures in the south polar region, due to its unique power/heat output ratios.
Never be cold again!
Only $400 trillion USD!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
NAPA and Pentium-M are not just for laptops: Intel is serious about putting them into 1U blade servers. In a server environment, it makes a lot of sense to have hardware RAID. Intel is also planning a new Xeon chip based on the 65nm Yonah core, codenamed Sossamn: http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=250 8&p=60 8&p=6
On a side note, the napa northbridge might soon be integrated into the pentium-m die, now they will have a fast cache and memory controller: http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=25
First, this feature is probably targeted at "Desktop Replacement Users" whose users care less about weight and battery life and more about their penis length^H^H computer features and hard drive space. The other group is the paranoid about data security, who want a constant backup hard drive to keep their laptop going even if a drive fails.
One note about battery life, I think the power consumed by a drive (assuming constant mass distribution) is proportional to rpm^{3/2} which means that a 7200 RPM drive consumes more than twice as much power as a 4200 RPM drive, so it would actually use less power to have 2 4200 RPM drives instead of a single 7200 RPM drive.
Second, you've explained why onboard video sucks up memory bandwidth but most laptops (ok, at least the Apple Powerbooks) have dedicated video RAM. In addition, in a RAID 0 configuration the drive uses no more bandwidth, because you are transferring the same amount of data as you would with only one drive. Even in a RAID 1 configuration, you transfer the same data twice so you still only need to read from RAM once. Yes, software RAID uses more of your CPU, but I have a software RAID 5 array set up on my 1.8 GHz P4 (that I use to backup my Powerbook) and I have no issues with too much CPU overhead.
Dude, no one is making you use RAID on your next laptop, but some people might find it useful so Intel is making it possible. Not to mention, once flash hard drives are out, you might just want RAID on your laptop.
Finally, if you want to support solid state hard drives, buy a USB key or several and support the industry.
There's a dupe hidden in ABS system.
Next: an integrated force feedback joystick controller, dual 10gbps FO board, redundant 600W power supplies and quad CPU support.
Writing this from a Centrino laptop I think that Intel would better try to find a way of delivering LOW consumption architectures, because the 2 hours authonomy that these pieces of crap usually pull is shamefull.
Also, I would like some God damned standards and out of the box support for Linux, because I'm so tierd of patching kernels and using experimental software to get the laptop to work decently. (But this is quite another story).
I bet 98% of people don't get your post.
Ptshah!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I'd rather have a wifi link and have my scsi hosted in a nice safe place. Make it 'mirror' over a wifi.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
I dont get why RAID isnt itself integrated into the disk. Instead of just a disk, vendors could sell a metadisk, into which you plug in other disks and the metadisk itself has an IDE or SATA plug, so ordiniary computers could just see it as a disk. Even better, seperate the chips on the disk from the platter structure, so you'd have a standard looking disk, only with two sealed containers instead of one. Should the platters in one 'container' go bad, replace it. The other half will just keep running.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Seems like desktops are becoming smaller, quieter and more efficient while notebooks are becoming larger, noisier and hungrier. Whatever happened to portability?
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
I for one am looking to *lighten* my laptop, not throw more hard drives and a bigger battery on it. I could see this working for larger laptops that are aimed at replacing desktop units but for a true laptop I think this would really drain the battery down too much and require a big bulky case to add more than one HD.
I do like the idea, I just don't think it's practical unless we get much smaller and lighter hard drives and longer lasting batteries. Heck, I think this IBM A31 laptop I have is too heavy.
First of all I didn't RTFA I just looked at the picture. Why? Because I don't care.
I doubt that RAID0 will be a popular configuration for this however that's what I'd do because I hate the slowness of my laptop's HD and I backup plenty often.
That said, RAID0 generaly does a good deal better than 20% faster. In my experiance, as an owner of 3 RAID arrays all in RAID0 I found 50% better was the minimum. Although on who knows, right?
That said, most people wouldn't want RAID0 in a laptop they want RAID1 so that if the drive craps they can keep working.
that said, putting it in the base station wouldn't make it RAID and especially if it contained different data, then it's just a second hard drive and doesn't need any controler at all it's JBOD array (tounge in cheek).
That said, I'd want a mirror drive in my docing station that's a great idea! however backing up 20GB off of a laptop hard drive takes a while because their generaly not every fast and even if it were fast that's still a lot of data, so maybe so sort of automatic solutin is in order. However that'd be very cool.
You missed a beautiful opportunity.
I bet 98% percent of people don't get your post.
A read generally only pulls from one drive at a time. If they have >2 drives, you could get some increased speed from the drive to the controller.
My understanding was that a good RAID1 controller (and this is Intel we're talking about, so I would expect them to use/make highend components) would divide the read command between the two drives and thus approach a 50% improvement in read time.
This seems fairly simple, seeing as how they already do the same thing for RAID0. The only difference should be in how the write command is issued. Am I missing something?
Integration of extra functionality is a good and will lead to smaller, cheaper, more energy efficient computers; although I can't see the sanity on a RAID controller for your average laptop - where I would prefer a smaller & more energy efficient CPU.
What next to integrate: ethernet subsystem; video controller; ... ?
Any bets that they have a patent on ''integrating RAID on a CPU chip'' -- further keep AMD out.
Perhaps... But hard drives themselves are also the most likely components to fail on laptops. Configuring a two-drive RAID 0 for speed would double the chances of catastrophic failure!
RAID will not make your games *run* faster. Games are entirely CPU and graphic bound, and disk performance has no impact. RAID *will* shave off a 1-2 seconds off your map load times, maybe. http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=66&page =2
Yeah, just like any other OS/hardware combo. But this is hardware RAID we're talking about.
...point. Don't think 2.5" drives, think micro drives. They are getting to a large enough capacity that a RAID array of those little iPod Mini style buggers would be fast, reliable, and probably burn less power than a big 2.5" HD.
I found backuppc to be an excellent tool for this.
The Raven
I agree with this part, but it's discouraging to note all the negative comments about such technologies in this this article from last month.
Centrino is just a brand Intel uses to get customers choose a laptop that includes their processor, and manufacturers to stick with Intel. They first started by bundeling wlan with their processors branding it Centrino. That made sure that everyone that was thinking to use their laptop with wireless networks bought a laptop that had Centrino. It also made sure that laptop manufacturers couldn't just use processor from Amd: the average Joe would just say in store "gee. that thing got no centrino. i want a wlan with my compu".
Of course Centrino brand isn't just about wlan, it's also about power savings and not having a oven in your lap, but those things are quite much harder to market. Now Intel is going to bundle RAID with Centrinos, which I would say is more about manufacturers need to specialise their offerings: "hey joe, don't buy that chepo laptop, this baby has two harddisks, it's 2xreliable that piece of crap. you wouldn't want to loose all your documents. would you!?". And by giving manufacturers one more feature to market, they make sure that laptop makers wont be moving to Amd or another competing platform.
And let's not forget Intels plans for world domination. They are a chip manufacturer and they want to rule their dominion. By including RAID chips to every single Centrino laptop they gain massive economies of scale in manufacturing which to leverage against other manufactuers of RAID chips. Now they will offer RAID 0 and 1 with Centrino, but the next step will be to offer RAID with higher levels to customers.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Apple. I can see apple requiring this if they are going to move the centrino to the desktop, which is what the cryptic quote of "performance per watt" Jobs mentioned in his keynote. My personal theory, which may be way off; is that because Apple likes elegance, and quiet machines, they would probably use the Pentium M line on their desktops. Now, if they use that, then why not marry RAID to the chipset? This would give them cheap RAID onboard that they could make standard for their video/audio editing market. Just a theory, discuss amungst yourselves.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
A VIP at my previous job (earlier this year) bought one of those fancy Toshiba Quasmio laptops. Among the features was that it had dual-drives... so we just had scripted backups.
RAID: Good for quick recovery after a loss, but quite often restoration of desktops isn't needed quite as quickly as a server, so this might be less useful
Scripted backup: The script has to actually run, but it's nice when your user deletes an important file and can still get it back (in RAID, the file goes off both drives)
Really, for laptops I'm hoping to see the cost of small-sized removable-rewritable storage media such as pendrives go down. They're quite quick with USB 2.0, so it would be nice to have a little script which would sync-backup your important stuff (the OS can be pre-imaged once) such as documents etc in a short period of time, plus it's safe when somebody drops coffee on the laptop - which can't be said for the two above in some cases.
If laptops as-is are already frying those down under, how is adding another hard drive going to help? So, again, won't somebody think of the children?
(though I admit the parent poster's insightful for seeing the beneifits with the tiny hard drives -- but those have nothing to do with intel)
Surely this is just so they can work around the slowing hard disk density trends,
where disks are struggling to get past 160GB and stay reliable and small.
Business users? Backups? It's nothing of the sort. You can bet Dell just want to
sell a 320GB striped-disk gamer laptop, and Alienware won't be far behind..
Neko
What about weight and power consumption? I know a lot of people use a laptop as a desktop replacement - BUT if they didn't also want portability they would have saved $$$ and bought a desktop. Is it really worth the extra weight and loss of battery run time to add another internal drive?
[Insert pithy quote here]
Why do you think laptops aren't as upgradable. When it dies just past the warrantee period, or a part fails, you either have to pay a premium to acquire/have-installed the new part, or replace the whole machine. Plus you have to pay the big bucks for a real machine because your lower-end video card sucks but is in reality only $50 cheaper.
Profit for them, sucks to be us... why would they change it?
A read generally only pulls from one drive at a time.
I've never seen a hardware RAID implementation do this. Perhaps they did in the past, but I get just under 2X read speed than with a single drive under RAID mirroring.
Third, any money says it'll use the onboard memory for its RAID controller or maybe even software RAID, meaning it, like onboard video will slow your computer down.
Be careful. If I were a gambler I'd take a lot of money on that bet. The RAID needs very little, if any, memory to accomplish it's basic tasks. Sure, wads of memory can speed things up a bit, but it's not necessary. Look at all the single chip RAID controllers out there. Additional off-chip memory? Nope. All performed in hardware? Yep. Load DOS on it with no drivers and it still performs its RAID functions.
Intel could be taking the low road, and simply implementing a cheap and simple copy or interleave module which at least removes most of the work of RAID from the OS, but it's unlikely to do so since the headaches become more troublesome (boot-up is done before such drivers are loaded, more headaches developing software support, etc)
Lot's of money is being put into solid state storage. But hard drives can beat solid state in the price war very easily. If someone does come up with a breakthrough, the HD manufacturers will "suddenly" double, triple, or quadruple their storage per dollar (or speed) without too much work. They can do so now, but the marginal cost isn't worth the marginal revenue - they climb the slope slowly because it's in their best financial interest to do so.
-Adam
Actually, rather than a true RAID drive I wish there were options for RAID partitions. How about an integrated SD-card... removable through the bottom but generally not any more visible than the drive. It could run a RAID'ed partition with the hard-disk, perhaps for a documents directory or something similar, but not affect overally power usage much.
Heck, I could already do this with 'nix if my integrated cardreader would work... software RAID doesn't much care what the source devices are.
Until manufacturers start producing disks that behave well, and the OS supports it properly, RAID is probably a waste. Granted, you are less likely to lose power on a laptop, but it can still happen, and your file system will trash your data for you! Having two sets of data which may easily become incoherent probably makes raid more of a liability than an advantage.
As it stands today, 95% (probably more) of disks are completely unsafe to use if you value your data. While you may take comfort in having a journalling, or otherwise atomic file system, beware, it does not work properly with write caching!
Before this problem is addressed, any sort of ATA raid is laughable. Theoretically, this problem should be solved when all drives and controllers support NCQ, but I'm not holding my breath; there is still an option which allows discs to lie about the completion of commands, and if there is _any_ performance benefit, I'm betting the disc manufacturers will enable it by default instead valuing your data consistency.
i remember seeing a site on Toms Hardware.. discussing and benchmarking different hard drive setups for games (performance wise). The fastest setup was a good ol' single hard drive, not the raid. So I guess this wont help gaming.... or battery life, or the weight of the laptop.. btw, Desktops will always be around.
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
If you are willing to pay $50 per gigabyte of solid state mass storage, go right on ahead. I'll continue to pay 1% of that per gigabyte of mechanical storage until a truly competitive alternative emerges.
Keep in mind that the costs of fabbing 1GB of flash memory is going to be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of fabbing 1GB of RAM. This is because of the relative transistor and feature size complexities involved, so it is unrealistic to expect silicon-based solid state mass storage to be inexpensive unless there is a significant breakthrough that affects flash fabbing and not RAM fabbing, or some other, completely different tech becomes available.
All of you don't seem to notice something: Intel is simply supporting RAID, not making it a requirement for Centrino laptops. Doing so would, as has been mentioned, severely limit battery power and make it heavier. It'd probably make them take up more room, too, seeing as there's not much space for another HDD in notebooks anyway. Intel has made some pretty stupid decisions in the past (coughcoughNetBurstcoughcough) but this is nothing more than another choice for companies. I could see this feature as an option for business-oriented notebooks like IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads.
/dev/hd* in *nix. It would provide the usability of thumb drives without the possibilty of them getting lost... Unless you lose your laptop, in which case you would be fired.
And as for solid-state hard-drives, two questions: First, what are the chances solid-state memory would become messed up, the way some laptop HDDs do when their host computer is dropped on the floor? And second, are two solid-state drives that use IDE capable of a RAID array? (Not that that would be at all useful, if my first question's answer is that they don't get messed up...)
I think the best solution we can have (for the moment, until solid-state becomes cheaper) is to have a hard drive which has all the computer-related things like programs and the OS, and then have a solid-state device built in to the computer as well. Employees could be instructed to save all of their work to the SS drive - Simply disguise it as D:\ in Windows, and make it behave like a
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
Combine that with a set of universal drive slots, and this could work out quite well in the future.
Personally, I'm rather fond of setting up my laptop with an external Firewire drive (though USB-2 works just as well) connected to my docking station, and then having a program called MirrorFolder (www.techsoftpl.com) setup so that when the laptop sees the drive out there it will sync, and if it's not attached (in true travel mode) it doesn't drop dead.
Seems to be just as good an answer as this is proposing, only it's available now, and somewhat reasonably priced.
No association with the company that makes it, just a satisfied user.
I was scared shitless until I realized I have no Laptops and only use AMD.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
For years now Sager has made laptops that have had RAID 0 and 1 options through a hardware RAID controller. Yes, it eats battery life like no other, but I don't see how this is a big advancement.
On the other hand, if your goal is more capacity, you may very well want two disks, but that doesn't mean they need to be RAID. Sometimes it can help (duplicating critical file systems, etc.), though some operating systems from the northwest side of North America aren't very good at giving you control over what resources really live where except for some of your user directories.
With either goal, power-management systems can do reasonably intelligent things with controlling the two disks. For instance, if you're not reading the disks very often, it's easy to scale back to only reading from one drive, and even if you're writing, you could do a sloppy-mirroring RAID approach that buffers writes to the second drive if it's currently spun down.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Alienware already offers this. Nothing to see here, move along.
7 700.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-AREA51-M-7700&SubCode=SKU-D EFAULT
http://alienware.com/Configurator_Pages/area-51m_
Wow, flamebait? That's a first. I thought I was being funny. Huh.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
The good news is the cost of fabbing 1GB of ram keeps going down! Where ram once cost $50/meg ($50,000/gig) it now runs as low as $50/gig -- one thousandth the price of a decade or two ago. Of course, unless something changes, by the time you can pick up ram for $1/gig, we'll have 200 TB harddrives for $200. ... But hey, maybe Moore's law will fail for harddrives long before it fails for ram.
That is my most *hated* expansion of acronym RAID.
Adminittedly, there is no suitable expansion for RAID when you consider RAID-0 (unless you make it recursive...).
Who says they are the least bit inexpensive? There is nothing about the technology that is inherently tied to expense in that sort of way.... However, the technology does involved things that are *I*ndependent of each other and the concept is central to the points of RAID....
While I'm at it, there is nothing particularly disk-specific either. I've never seen anyone but me question this, but strictly speaking the D would be better expanded as 'Devices' than 'Disks'.
Which leaves R for Redundant, which doesn't apply to RAID-0, but it is descriptive for everything but RAID-0, and I can't think of a better fit, so:
Redundant Array of Independent Devices
Is a much more relevant description of RAID... Just my two cents.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I bought a Sager laptop that has Raid over a year ago. Sager has had 2 new models all with raid since mine was brand new.
The standardising of laptops has happened as much as it is going to happen.
Not because big brand computer retailers want to nececarily, but because they are all hiring the same company in Tiawan.
The video cards are MCM (or somthing like that)
They all have MiniPCI slots and the same antene hookups for WiFi
All the modems are that same funky little board with the dual surface mount plugs and anoyying little 2 pair socket.
Of course the memory and HDD have been standard for a long time (Even those seemingly proprietary (old)IBM, its a standardd drive in a metal casse with a pass through connector)
All the CD Drives, are one of 2 or 3 standaards with custom plastic on them, get a new one that matches, swap the plastic. Same woth floppy driveee (those lucky to have them internal these days. And most of them (both cdrom and floppy) are Mitsumi.
Its the real corporate duche bags that decide to use proprietary lockouts in the bios (Ive heard of HP and Dell, probably more) most notably on WiFi cards that ruin it for us.
On modern laptops, you can swap out most of the hardware there, some even have a socket for the CPU so you can upgrade it too (My old Sony VAIO).
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
How does one measure HD read performance?
Seriously, I'm curious. I consider myself a technically proficient person, and I use RAID myself both at work and at home, but I fail to see how a mirrored disk will make Doom 3 run faster.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
TFA: "get two 7200RPM laptop hard drives in RAID, and put an end to the major bottleneck in mobile gaming at the moment."
I'm not a gamer, so I don't understand. RAID isn't THAT much faster for reads and writes, nothing like 50%, and a RAID optimized for reads will not be that much faster for writes and vice versa. I guess, unless the chip caches big time, which I doubt it can do at its price point.
So - huh?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The only real problem here is power. Once your notebook gets 5 years old you wont be able to find a replacement battery at all, and even if you could it will be expensive because they're all virtually model specific. Then again, there's the 19.5V AC adapter that dell bundled with my notebook. Went out just about 120days after I bought it (suspiciously just past the 90 day warranty). Now I spent $40 (I was lucky it retails at $80+ship) for a power accessory that could have just as easily been $10.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Why? As if it is not noisy, hot or big enough? If it is about speed, FLASH will do that trick. Yeah it's much smaller but now it's drastically cheaper than few years ago and I think laptop use requires mobility than storage space.
minor detail,
raid-1 you (can) get faster read speed, but you do end up with slower write speed.
reason:
it reads as fast as any one drive reads can read the data.
it writes as fast as all drives can write the data.
assuming random behavior of 50% they do better then average write time, and 50% they do worse, and their behavior is independent of each other (due to reading different spots of the drive, or whatever)
75% of the time you'll get below average write time from both drives.
(25% both went fast, 25% a goes slow, 25% b goes slow, 25% both went slow)
what i'm waiting for is the two armed HD. Get the fun of a raid-0 without much additional overhead. Even a bit of the joy of raid-1 since both arms would be able to read the same disk.
with SATA2 and queueing, it should be possible for the HD to manage two read/write arms inside the same HD enclosure. (or even 3 or 4 arms, but there is only so much space, limited cost/benifit)
How does adding a second hard drive to your battery-powered notebook support improved performance per watt? Hard drives aren't exactly power misers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21 01&p=10
RULE #1 If you want better performance buy a better drive, not more drives.
If you want data integrity a MUCH better alternative would be to simply use a 4GB flash drive, and hey, its available now, doesn't use all your battery, is silent, weighs nothing, and is more portable, adding another HD to a laptop is a bit stupid. Not a very good idea Intel...
And hundred of enterprise SANs out there routinely backup their data using RAID - most commonly by taking a "snapshot" of an existing RAID array with another RAID array.
Ok, so this isn't exactly what the hardware described in TFA is capable of, but if you could build-in hardware that would accomplish hot-syncing a laptop disk with no cranky and difficult-to-configure-by-morons backup software, that would be useful. Let me tell you abot the times where places I have worked have supposedly teetered on the brink of bankrupcy and total failure, with the CIO throwing furniture through windows and so on, because somebody's laptop disk didn't get backed up.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Read my SATA RAID FAQ.
It's all software RAID, provided by the BIOS and OS drivers.
Or in other words, its Softare RAID, provided by the marketing department.
Not quite. RAID-0 in most cases just adds the two drives together, but doesn't interleave them. You end up with 0-40GB of disc 1 and 40-80GB of disc 2. It maintains an index of the range of the drives. I assume it's possible a controller has that, but not that I've seen. Never seen them interleave.
So RAID-0 just offers additional Space.
RAID-1 offers 2x the writes (but they happen at the same time), and unless it has some really nice request queueing, odds are it reads from only one drive. Maybe controllers have become better over the years... who knows.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Back ups, when I was in school I "abused" the free e-mail with 250 megs of NQA "blind" storage to get what was then an "impressive" 1.5 gigs. I for one when I have criticle data find places that use inexpensive floppies or DAT drives with a script that updates the info every preset amount of time to be awsome. It can be unintrusive, two back DAT's a "live" one and a final one. The live didly just stores the current computer state good or bad naivly updating it the final one asks politely to back something up once at 6am noon 1800hours and mabie at midnight, The campus computer dork was even more conservative and had three backups, all on tape one that ran continuously as he works one that did it at times when he knew he wasn't carefull like meetings etc. and a final midnigh just in case sort of deel. RAID for a laptop? why bother?
Actually, I did this long ago in my thinkpad. It has two drives that are split up as four. One partition is the boot and the other three are a RAID5. It's as fast as a RAID 0 (this is true on my desktop system as well where I actually have multiple drives) and the two drives in my laptop take up no more space than the one drive used to. If you look at the new 1.8" drives you will see they are as "long" as a 2.5" drive is wide and half as wide as a 2.5" drive is long. The two drives sit side by side in the old slot where the 2.5" drive sat. Two 20GB drives provides 20GB of raid 5 storage and 10GB for boot, swap, and "extra" stuff. Once the system is booted it runs mostly off the 20GB RAID and it's noticeably faster than using a single molasses slow notebook drive.
Hrm- maybe I should check out some newer controllers- RAID-1 doesn't offer nearly enough 'bang for the buck' so we end up with SCSI RAID-5 or other combination RAID sets.
Well this is exactly it though- it's going in laptops that have all come down significantly in price, battery requirements, and more. I don't see them putting high end RAID hardware in there.
Take your latest and greatest RAID controllers- I'm talking the nice Adaptec SCSI controllers... or if you want to go IDE/ATA, some Promise, Highpoint, etc controllers. Of course onboard memory is pretty important here, but it's more servers.
If I had to guess, this is going to be an 'additional instruction set' that has some highly optimized parity in there that the drivers can use to offload parity checks from the CPU.
In time solid state will take over.. At present it's the slowest, loudest part of the computer (other than a FDD).
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
In fact, I can't see RAID being all that useful on a laptop anyway. Your hard drive is one of the biggest consumers of power in the machine; you're doubling that now. Not to mention the extra heat.
If you run RAID-0, for redundancy, you're going to have worse performance. If you run RAID-1, you'll get better performance, but the fastest laptop drive is, what, 7200 RPM? Seeks are still extremely slow compared to good desktop drives. And, unless I'm mistaken, all other forms of RAID need more than two drives. Do you really want more than two drives in a laptop? Great battery life there, and yeah, REAL portable...
This might be useful, however, if this feature ever makes its way to the desktop, although we're seeing more and more mobos with SATA RAID controllers built-in. Or, if people are willing to accept the slowdown of RAID-0, worse battery life and more weight, this *might* be useful for businesspeople. But come on... is your ordinary laptop user going to be able to rebuild parity if a drive fails?
RAID in laptops is nothing new. This is already offered by Alienware in their Area-51m and MJ-12m lines as options. Yes, it ads weight. Yes it reduces battery life dramatically. Yes, it's worth it for mobile workstations that are usually plugged in and demand performance/uptime.
The only thing that is new here is that the technology will be more high integrated. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad idea. In notebooks this might be okay as it makes upgrades easier. But for those looking at this as something great for servers in the future I think you should look somewhere else. For servers, you typically look to offload work from the processor not give more work to it. Plus, RAID 0,1 have limited server applications. (web servers or low-end servers might use RAID 1...anything else is looking for RAID 5 if possible)
AlpineR
yes.. but think of it.. laptop with solid state drives & RAID - that is a dream come true.. and to be honest the 3oz weight is a small price to pay for redundant drives. yea power is an issue but that should be recouped by the new cpu and even the weight could be recouped by needing smaller heat sinks for the new cpu so all in all you might jsut get the same laptop with the same weight and power but with raid.. i don't see the reason you wouldn't want that
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
In theory, RAID-0 gets you additional space, and access that's no slower than one drive and up to number of drives times faster (since the best case splits evenly between the drives, and the worst hits one drive only). RAID-1 gets you identical write speeds (as writes go to all drives), and up to number of drives times faster reads (since each read comes from one of the drives in the set). Of course, practically you get a slight decrease from the theoretical performance.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Linux/BSD software raid.. im doing this with compact flash on a CF TO IDE adpater than can host 2 cards (ide has slave and master) so I have performance faster than a normal 4200 rpm drive, yet it uses alot less power and preety much shock proof.. i have them in a raid 0 and no I dont use a swap file on them.. and yes 80x cf cards do perform preety fast in a raid 0.. just a thought if you guys want to try it out yourself on your lappy there is even a company that makes a 2.5 laptop hd formfactor mount for the cf cards with an 44 pin ide adapter..all on a p2120...
According to the benchmarks I've seen, it doesn't even afford much in the way of performance, either.
1 01
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
First, this feature is probably targeted at "Desktop Replacement Users" whose users care less about weight and battery life and more about their penis length^H^H
When you leave school and get a job, you may realise that for some people, 90% of their time is spent behind a desk, but that the other 10% is spent on a client site/travelling/at home etc... such that a "Desktop Replacement" makes perfect sense.
I'm one such user and spend most of the day cross-compiling hundereds of millions of lines of code. I've always found laptop HDD performance poor, and currently use a pair of 7200rpm drives, once for source, one for object. Still the performance is sub-desktop machine, and not CPU bound. I get just less than 2 hours battery life from the laptop, and that is acceptable.
I welcome this news from Intel.
Maybe it's because the blade servers are too hot and they need a cooler chip
If we're going for productivity on the road and on battery power. Powering two drives isn't going to help productivity when the battery dies after 1 hour.
Maybe some way to resync upon AC power? From my experiences though resyncing is never a quick process.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Because the alternate is fixing a problem users have hated for some time in portable computing- weight and power. What's the point in reducing the power if you're going to use it up again? The whole point of this excercise is to extend battery life and decrease weight so we cary our laptops more, use them longer, and don't need to be attached by a power cord to the wall (as many do now).
I want a laptop that doesn't outweigh my briefcase or notebook.
I want a laptop that is actually wireless and free of a power cord (WLAN is neat and all, but when you have 2-3h battery life from most modern notebooks with a 15" screen and all, you need to plug it in anyway unless you're just having a 30min cup of coffee)- like wireless during an entire meeting, presentation, or day at the cottage, trip out to the middle of the lake, etc.
So we can:
a. increase battery life, reduce size, and weight by ?25%?
-or-
b. give you a second hard drive, taking up 2.5"x0.5" of space in the case, making noise and heat, using the battery life you know you have, and adding more strain on your shoulder.
I'd rather have the first, and I think most people would agree. Devices are getting smaller, faster, and lighter! A family member just got a MP3 player that's a 1/2inch cubed and has a 15h rechargable battery built in. Digital cameras are tiny nowdays. Why should my notebook be any heavier or bigger than the human interface device (keyboard and screen)!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
How about a Quadro FX 1440? Dell's Precision M70 lappy is what we use at work, and boy RAID would be nice on those puppies...
Maybe you're wrong.
Moore's Law is faster for hard drives, and shows no signs of slowing down.
Check out Alienware's high-end laptops (using one now and calling it a laptop is a bit of a stretch) same can be configured (in the BIOS) to use RAID 0, 1, or dual drives (I'm running RAID 0).
Um, I'm sitting here typing this on an Alienware Area 51m 7700. This particular one isn't Raided because I chose to install Linux on one disk and leave Windows on the other (frikin work making me use Remedy), however any of the 7700 can be RAID 0 or 1 provided you want to pay for it.
Now I realize that this isn't a Pentium M, it's a P4, but this new Centrino isn't going to suddenly be the first for "laptop raid".
I think the fact is you have just made a compelling argument to travel for business with two laptops. If you are using raid ONLY for redundancy, then you have to ask, what about the screen, battery, motherboard, and umpteen other components that could fail -- and stop all work -- while traveling.
I think a better solution -- although more expensive, surely -- would be to stow an extra laptop in your baggage, configured similarly/ identically. Store your unique data on both the internal drive and a removable drive (usb flash, cdrw). Then, without the loss of battery life (and thus portability) you've saved yourself from all manner of fatal failures. Since you are on the company's dime, why not spring for another $2000 for a spare laptop. If the drive goes bad in one (or the battery, display, keyboard, etc), chuck it in the overhead, pull out the other, and resume work with a fresh charge.
Now you don't have to worry about finding any repair shops, you just have to find the nearest fed-ex. You ship your failed system to your IT people, they send it (or a replacement) back, and now you're prepared for the trip home with the same level of redundancy.
Here's two failover scenarios:
1. One laptop with two hardrives, raid: 2 hours of battery. But atleast harddrive failure won't interrupt the 2 hours you've got.
2. Two laptops with one harddrive each: 4 x 2 hours of battery. Any single failure will leave you with at least 4 hours of work.
In the best case of a drive failure near the end of battery life, you will "enjoy" nearly 8 hours of work compared to at most 2-3 hours (for the huge laptop with two harddrives).
To me, raid in a laptop seems like a waste. Single drive failure is such a small factor compared to set of productivity threats faced by a laptop (in the server room there's about zero chance of droppage, theft, spillage, battery failure, forgotten AC cords, closing the display with a pen on the keyboard, among others). I think you'd be better off with two inexpensive laptops (e.g., two stock iBooks = $2000) than one 'big' laptop with a single redundant drive. Leave raid for scenarios where it's really beneficial, 4 drives or more, striping+mirroring, n-1 crc recovery, etc.
Finally, using raid JUST for redundancy and not for recovery/integrity (like in our pretend laptop, 2-disk raid-1) is retarded; I mean where's the high-availabilty in a laptop without hot-plug?! All that wasted overhead for what? I guess it's only a matter of time for laptops to have at least 3 harddrives, at which point other [useful] raid levels [3 and 5] finally open up.
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. Cheers. (Pardon any typos)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
The ipod hard disk is 1.8" isn't it? (or so)
2 of those in a 40gb size would still be a fair amount of space considering most people using laptops are pulling data off a lan / wan / internet
Not that I'd pay the premium, I use a damned good tool to backup my laptop weekly - but 2 of those smaller disks would likely be the same weight / heat / power requirements as a single 2.5"
On that note, when is the desktop PC going to be minituarized (sp?) with 2.5" - Seagate's talking about releasing 160gb 2.5" drives soon......
Miniaturization gives you two options. You can either have a smaller version of the same thing you had yesterday or you can pack more features into an item that's the same size as the one it's replacing. It's obvious which option you'd want, but that doesn't mean that an extra option is a bad thing. The "desktop replacement" crowd is going to love this. A 7200 rpm IDE RAID has been very affordable in desktops for some time now, yet you still have to pay a premium for a single 7200 rpm drive in a laptop. Having the option of going with 2 5400 rpm drives (with the opportunity to upgrade to 2 7200 rpm drives in the future) definitely has its benefits.
Thanks, that matches my understanding, but I'll have to nitpick your phrase "RAID-0 gets you additional space". In truth, it doesn't gain anything. It's just that you're not sacrificing anything for the sake of parity, as you do in most RAID sets.
For the grandfather post, RAID0 is commonly caused "striping", which is obviously a synonym for "interleaving". JBOD is short for "Just a Bunch Of Disks" where nothing fancy is done with the data; the controller just makes the disks appear to be one large disk.
Of course, the MTBF of any RAID is lower than the MTBF of a single drive; this implies that a RAID-0 or JBOD, which have no redundancy, are less reliable than a single drive, while a RAID-1 or above is only more reliable if you change the failed drive quickly enough.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Most laptop manufacturers use 5400 RPM HDD's insead of 7200 to save the batteries, which does help quite a bit. I don't even want to think the batterylife from a laptop that has to spin up two Hdd's.
I guess they'd better come up with portable cold fusion quick to power these puppies.
I do love "!" but not as much as I love "..."...
There are some small form factor desktops that take 2.5" hard drives (the Mac Mini is an obvious example, but there are PC versions also.)
Problem is that 2.5" drives are still _much_ more expensive per gigabyte compared to 3.5", and 3.5" is generally small enough even for very small desktops (Shuttle comes to mind, although the Mac Mini is substantially smaller again.)
They are also generally slower, and the 7200rpm versions are rare and more expensive again.
I'd reckon that this 160gb 2.5" drive when it comes out will cost at least as much as a 500gb 3.5" - if not more.
2.5" drives are finding use in servers, blades in particular.