You are configuring a computer running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. You need to configure the computer for maximum disk performance and throughput for the hard disks. Disk configurations will be implemented through operating system software.
Which disk configuration should you use?
1. >>Two hard disks configured to support RAID 0.
2. Two hard disks configured to support RAID 1.
3. Two hard disks configured as stand-alone (independent) drives.
4. Three hard disks configured to support RAID 5.
Explanation : You should use two hard disks configured to support RAID 0. RAID, which stands for either Random Array of Inexpensive Disks or Random Array of Independent Disks (depending on who you ask), provides disk configurations designed to maximize performance, fault tolerance, or both.
RAID 0 is a configuration with two or more non-redundant hard disks. Data is striped across the hard disks, which means that data is written in a pattern that alternates between the disks. This provides fast disk performance because of the use of split reads and writes when processing data on the drives. The major disadvantage of this configuration is that if you lose either hard disk, all data on both hard disks is lost.
You should not use two hard disks configured as stand-alone (independent) drives. You can get some improvement in disk performance over a single hard disk, but the performance increase would be much less than that from a RAID 0 disk configuration.
You should not use two hard disks configured to support RAID 1. A RAID 1 configuration has two hard disks with duplicate data. When the computer writes to one hard disk, it also writes to the other, called the mirror, so that the data remains the same on both. You can see a marginal performance improvement during disk reads over a single hard disk. The primary advantage of this configuration is that it is fault tolerant. You can lose either hard disk without losing any data.
You should not use three hard disks configured to support RAID 5. RAID 5 is a disk striping with parity configuration. It is similar to RAID 0 in that data is striped across the disks, but so is parity information. The parity information is used to check for data errors and can be used to recreate the data if any one hard disk is lost, so this is a fault tolerant configuration. When implementing RAID 5 through software, as in this case, performance is not as good as for RAID 0 because of the overhead needed to create parity information during disk writes and check parity information during disk reads.
Objective: Personal Computer Components
