Tips N Tweaks 5

Alrighty! In the last article we covered RAID 0 which are also known as Striped Volumes. Fun stuff, right?

Well this time around we are going to give a few tips about RAID 1 arrays, which are also known as Mirrored Volumes. Mirroring your volumes adds a level of redundancy or backup to your system, in case of a HDD failure. And as we all know, all DJs carry backups, right?  Just think of a “mirrored” array as a form of backup that you carry right inside of your CPS. 

Here’s the general concept behind RAID 1 - if you have one HDD with all of your music, karaoke and videos on it, you have another of equal size set up to hold an exact copy of all that data.  Essentially, if one drive fails - which they will sooner or later - you already have a complete backup built into your system, right down to all that track information, BPMs and notes you made to your original.  It’s as simple as updating your music library and the RAID 1 keeps an exact copy on a separate HDD.

To set up a RAID 1 configuration, you need a minimum of two HDDs of equal size or at least two partitions of equal size on different physical disks.  Again, this is one of those fancy power-user applications that you cannot set up on a laptop.  And unlike the Striped Volume we covered previously, a Mirrored Volume still acts as a standalone HDD, just with the benefit of having a complete mirrored copy on another HDD in case of failure or malfunction.  It’s just that easy!

As always, if you are interested in learning more about RAIDs or using a computer to DJ with, I highly recommend reading my book Introduction to Computer DJing & CPS.

Tags: computer dj, cps, digital dj, laptop dj, mirrored volume, raid1

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 23:17 and is filed under Computer DJing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.