Raid question

RAID 0 creates one large disk out of two small disks, and the data is interleaved between them half-and-half. Reliability is lower because you loose all you data if EITHER drive fails.

RAID 1 creates a mirrored volume from a pair of disks with two copies of the data, one on each disk - so the capacity is the same as the smallest disk. Reliability is higher because your data is still accessible if either drive fails.

It's dangerous to be fiddling with RAID if you don't have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. Before you commit important data to those disks you should experiment with what happens if a drive fails and how to recover from it. You don't want to be learning what is and isn't possible when a drive containing your precious data has ALREADY failed...

You asked:
I thought raid 0 treated it as one 74gb drive?


...and I replied:
RAID 0 creates one large disk out of two small disks...

RAID 1 creates a mirrored volume from a pair of disks with two copies of the data, one on each disk - so the capacity is the same as the smallest disk...


To be more succinct: No, RAID 0 does not treat two 74GB drives as one 74GB drive. That's what RAID 1 does.

RAID and partitioning have essentially no relationship. Once you create a RAID volume (of any kind, RAID 0, RAID 1, etc.), you can partition it any way you want, including two partitions for dual-booted OSes.

Are you trying to use RAID so that you get better performance? Or are you more concerned about protecting yourself against a drive failure? Or Both?

OK, that sounds good. Don't forget to have a backup strategy. You should be doing backups whether you use RAID or not, but just be aware that the chance of loosing your data is higher with RAID 0 and that makes a good backup strategy that much more important.

Nope, no different.