Mirroring and Striping

[lg123]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the difference between mirroring and striping?

[gandolf989]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the difference between mirroring and striping?

When you mirror two disks each disk is a "mirror" copy of the other. All changes happen to both drives simultaneously. When you stripe two drives, the look like one physical drive, but data gets written to one of the two drives. So mirroring give you redundancy and striping gives you more storage space but no redundancy.

[marist89]

When you stripe two drives, the look like one physical drive, but data gets written to one of the two drives. So mirroring give you redundancy and striping gives you more storage space but no redundancy.

...and better I/O throughput.

[ebrian]

RAID

[KenEwald]

... All changes happen to both drives simultaneously.

You're exactly right on this. If I might add... ASM has a really cool paradigm for mirroring. Instead of the mirror copy being on the exact same cylinder and track of both drives, it applies an "anywhere else but here" rule to the mirror copy. Mirrored data can live on drives of different sizes and speeds, although the latter is not recommended, it does work.

Cheers,
Ken