SirCrono

Distinguished
Sep 9, 2006
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RAID-0 means putting two disks working in tandem, without parity, meaning one drive fails, say bye bye tou all your data, the advantages are faster read and write speeds and no capacity loss.

RAID-1 means putting two disks mirroring each other, meaning one drive fails, nothing happens, disadvantages are you lose half the storage capacity and you get no performance increase.

Those are (according to me) the most common ones, but you can find most if not all RAID types here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

I'd really recommend you read it.
 


Most motherboards support only RAID 0, 1,5 and 10.

0 means almost twice the speed, at least for working with large files, but less data safety. One drive crashing loses data on all drives.
1 means a few % less speed and 50% less space but when a drive crashes you still have all the data on the other drive.

The others are combinations with 3 or more disks. It really depends on what you need and how many drives you can afford to buy.