WHY YOU NEED RAID ON YOUR OS/2 DESKTOP SYSTEM Chances are good that the disk drives in your OS/2 system will escape your attention until one day at the worst possible time, you experience a disk crash. Then all you can do is hope that the backup you made last week has the data you need to finish a report thats due in 30 minutes. Thats the risk you take when you put all your eggs in one high-tech basket with a single hard disk drive. Sooner or later that disk drive is going to crash or have a media defect and youll lose valuable time and piles of money as you replace failed disks and spend hours recreating lost data using antiquated tape back- up products. With new EZRAID Lite software for OS/2 ($195) and any two standard hard disk drives, you can quickly and inexpensively add the benefits of RAID technology to any OS/2 system. EZRAID Lite supports three different RAID implementations in a single package. With EZRAID Lite guarding your data, OS/2 becomes a powerful fault-tolerant system that can handle a complete drive failure without batting an eye or losing a byte. Best of all EZRAID Lite works using standard IDE, ESDI and SCSI drives and host adapters. CHOOSE FROM THREE DIFFERENT RAID ARCHITECTURES IN ONE MONEY-SAVING PACKAGE EZRAID Lite offers three different RAID implementations that can be used in any combination with your disk drives. DISK MIRRORING (RAID LEVEL 1) Disk Mirroring requires two disk drives. All data that is written to the first disk is duplicated in real-time onto a second disk providing complete data redundancy. Mirroring is vastly superior to any current backup technology. If either disk fails, the system will continue to operate without interruption from the second disk. EZRAID Lite is the only software RAID product available for OS/2 that allows you to mirror any existing logical drive with the need to backup, reformat or even reboot the system. You can ever mirror the OS/2 boot partition for total system fault-tolerance. DISK STRIPING (RAID LEVEL 0) Designed to turbo-charge the performance of your hard disk drives, disk striping requires two disks and uses striping to write data across both hard disks. Although no fault-tolerance is provided with disk striping, disk I/O can be dramatically enhanced by balancing both reads and writes across two disk drives. In addition, EZRAID Lites built-in caching further enhances performance. By combining the capacities of the two disk drives into a single large logical disk allowing you to create file sizes that are larger than any single disk. DISK SPANNING Spanning allows you to treat a number of smaller physical disks as a single large logical drive having their combined storage capacity. For example with spanning, you could transparently combine a 200 Mbyte drive with a 300 Mbyte drive and have them appear to OS/2 a logical drive D: with 500 Mbytes of storage. Unlike disk striping, there is no performance gain, this technique just simplifies data management since by treating all your disk space as a single large drive.