What's the different between RAID 0, 1, or whatever?

[ahthurungnone]

So, what 's the differences? Is one better than the other? Help!!!

 

[adampower]

There's a good article on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Raid 0 is where two or more disks work together (stripe) to do the job of one big disk. If you save a 2 bit file on a raid of 2 disks it would theoretically save 1 bit to one disk and 1 bit to the other. That way it can read and write twice as fast. However the R in RAID stands for redundant and this raid has none. If one disk fails the entire array is toast.

Raid 1 (mirror) is redundant. It is designed to guard against disk failure. A two disk Raid 1 has two identical disks doing the same job. When you save that 2 bit file it saves both bits to both drives. If one drive fails you are left with an exact copy on the other drive and no data should be lost. However, there is a 50% hit in size. ie if two 1tb disks are used to build a RAID1 the net space is 1tb.

imho since SSDs have matured there is little need for RAID in the everyday system. It should be more or less relegated to storage systems (where it was developed) such as NetworkAttachedStorage.

 

[ahthurungnone]

So, I would need Raid 1 since I cannot afford to lose my wife's pictures. (She would kill me.) How can I then tell if I have the ability to setup Raid 1?

 

[adampower]

Your motherboard has a controller which can handle RAID 1. Check the manual and it will tell you which SATA ports connect to that controller. Then, when you boot up it will bring you to some sort of 'software RAID' type of screen. This simply means that the controller (hardware) sees the drives and the 'thinking' is done by your CPU (in a RAID1 the CPU load is basically nil).

Then, periodically, take your wife's pictures and email them to yourself or copy them to an external drive and bring that drive to work. This guards against theft/fire/etc. and RAID1 does not.

If you have any difficulty during the setup just throw up a question and the guys in this forum will fix you up.

 

[ahthurungnone]

I believe the drive is already recognized as a RAID drive since when I installed the driver disc it has the option to install the RAID driver. (Note: on MSI installation discs it will only give you the option to install drivers that are compatible.) Thanks so much for your help.

 

[ahthurungnone]

Best answer selected by ahthurungnone.