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? "

Re:About Time.

[superpulpsicle]

The title really should be HARDWARE RAID. Software RAID has always been possible on laptops.

Re:WTF for?

[LurkerXXX]

Some folks will do it for speed. RAID0. Laptop drives are usually pretty slow, and usually what makes a laptop significantly slower than an desktop with an equivalent CPU speed (I buy 7200 RPM ones for my laptops myself, but 5400 is more common). RAID0 can add some needed speed. If your just doing word processing/email, that speed isn't needed, but some folks do serious computations on their laptops, others have their laptop do dual duty as their game rig. Not everyone is going to use their computer like you do.

Others will do it for the extra reliability. Nightly backups might be good enough for you, but as I said, not everyone uses their laptops for the sort of work you do.

Re:WTF for?

[mikael]

Because Murphy's Law predicts that things will always go wrong at the worst possible time.

If you have backups and keep them at the home/office then you will be screwed if you are away at a conference and your hard disk drive fails on the night before you have to make a Powerpoint presentation.

Having a RAID Level 1 architecture, gives you the chance to have two hard-disk drives with identical copies of the same information. At least if one fails, you still have the other.

Although, I would hope that both hard disk drives are kept away from each other within the laptop, as if one overheated, it could very well fry the other one.

Re:WTF for?

[dsginter]

Forgive my ignorance, but why on earth would anyone want RAID on their laptop?

I've got an $1900 bill from Ontrack Data Recovery sitting next to me that would explain the situation nicely. In the business world, not everyone is a tech-savvy geek with a broadband connection or a secure backup technique.

Re:Work backups

[Qzukk]

Actually, with mirroring and a system that can be brought up/down whenever, mirrored raid can be used for backups: you can shut down, swap out a drive, and be holding a copy of the entire drive in your hand (takes a while to remirror the new drive though, but many systems can do this while the computer is running, just a lot slower). Whether that is a great way to take backups or not is a different issue.

Re:Work backups

[FireFlie]

Raid is intended to keep the machine running in the event of a hardware failure.

... by backing up the data. Part of the purpose of raid is increased data integrity [wikipedia.org].

The first definition of data integrity from wikipedia is: 1. The condition that exists when data is unchanged from its source and has not been accidentally or maliciously modified, altered, or destroyed.
Sounds like a backup to me. Sure it won't stop you from deleting a file from both drives, but it will act as a back-up in the event that a drive does fail.

Re:Offsite Backups

[Cheeze]

oh man that would be slow. Think of an office of 50 people all mirroring over 802.11b or g. That would be horrible.

RAID does not improve gaming performance - stats

[rbrinkman]

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 [amdzone.com]

Re:WTF for?

[Vancorps]

Well, if you're that clumsy with equipment then buy the ToughBook. Thing won't care if you drop it.

I'm still trying to figure out what is so special about including RAID in a laptop though. HP has been doing it with their upper model level laptops for at least a year now. One of my friends came back from the army with his, it had dual SATA 250s in it. Fast as all hell. Naturally battery life suffered tremendously. I think he'd be lucky to get an hour out of it.

Laptop Standards

[starwindsurfer]

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).

RAID sucks for gaming

[llZENll]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21 01&p=10 [anandtech.com]

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...

Re:Work backups

[HuguesT]

Actually, technically all laptops are absolutely fine at 9.8m/s^2. This is the acceleration they feel by sitting sill on a table for example.

When they do fall for a while they experience a marked deceleration, and then later a huge acceleration again, much higher than g.

This is the latter they don't like ;-)