Raid for OS and software or Storage

Think your also missing Raid 1 in there.

Well Raid 0 Is a big no no unless you have backups often. This is something i would use for like an OS drive that if you lose anything it doesn't matter.

Raid 1 is Mirroring. This is good is one drive has a failure it kicks on in. Only thing (And this is from personal experience) if the File system gets corrupted it does it to BOTH drives.

Raid 5 or 6 are good for redundancy and performance. Raid 5 needs at least 3 disk. You have the space of all the drives minus 1 drive (which is the parity drive in case a drive failes that drive kicks in) A Raid 6 is the same but minus 2 drives. This is becoming more popular because it can handle a 2 Drive failure but you need at least 4 drives.

Now a raid 10 will give you the best performance and the best redundancy but its also the most costly. Pretty much you have a raid 1 of lets say 4 drives. So 2 and in raid 1 and another two are in raid 1 and then those two raid 1's are in a raid 0. So you can lose one drive in each Raid 1 and you will be ok. If you lose both drives in a raid 1 then your screwed.

Now there is a raid 0+1 which is the oppsite. Its two drives in a raid 0 and then another two drives in a raid 0 and those two raids 0's are in a raid one. The thing is if you lose one drive from each raid 0 your screwed.

Now for a file drive a Raid 1 is pretty good and its the cheapest. It also depends on what you can do. Now me I don't trust Software Raids very much. Best to have a Raid card even if its onboard Raid.

Just make sure you set up the raid before you start saving data to it.

As for as the OS goes sounds like nothing important will be on there so i wouldn't even work about doing any kind of raid for that. I know i don't worry about it. I have 2 2TB in a raid 0 and i have a 4TB drive that i clone every once in a while when i have a lot of new data. This saves me from any kind of possible partition corruption and also i can keep my backup drive in my Fire proof safe as well. Only thing is that it takes me almost 24 hours to clone it lol Still using Sata II but i still get a nice 260 Read and 180 Write on the Raid 0.