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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? "
Because people don't backup on the network once a night and you go to a normal person and you ask them to do that they will stare at you with a blank face. Then if you show them how to do it the face will become more blank.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What if you're traveling? If you do it a lot, it's likely one of your drives will fail.. But you have an up-to-the-second backup with you at all times.
Not everyone will need/want it. Personally I'd keep mine in a RAID-0 config because laptop drives are low RPM.
Latewire
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.
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.)
Raid is not for backups. Raid is intended to keep the machine running in the event of a hardware failure.
Indeed. I learned this in an important, almost "hard" way.
I had my home system on a 2x120GB raid1 setup, with no spare. I made daily full backups to another stand alone disk.
Imagine my surprise when they both started acting up, in the same way, at the same time. Eventually, they both completely died on the same day.
What had happened was my power supply had gone bad, though not died. It was outputting dirty power, and slowly damaged both drives. It also smoked the on board IDE controller, requiring an add on replacement.
Why it did not damage the disk i had backups on, I am not sure. The only thing I can think of is that I always spun the drive down after backups.
So, excellent point you have there.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
At the university I work some of the more overhyped IT courses lend laptops to their students. Of the about 1000 laptops in circulation there are maby 3-4 dead HDs a year, and it's all due to generous amounts of gravity. :D
/greger
It's impossible to have a single set of standards since laptops have many specialized purposes. However, the better models have standardized on upgradable video card formats (MXM). I'm hoping to buy a Quanta laptop soon that has an upgradable Nvidia Geforce 6600 Go video card.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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
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?"
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.
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.
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?"