Some doubts about RAID and SSD

[Mvx15n]

Hi all,

after getting another faulty hard drive this time without early warning just stopped working (5th in 15 years) I'm considering setting two drives in raid 1 because i was lucky of having backup of most data but it is quite painful and time to recover it.
Currently I have an 2600k on an asus p8z68-pro with an intel 120GB 320ssd for system.

I have some doubts about raid 1 drives :
- Is the data stored in a controller specific way? I mean if one of the drives fail together with the motherboard do I loose the data? or the data remains in the other drive in an accessible way for any pc?
- I've calculated that with two 2TB drives I can keep my pictures and data for the next two years, considering more performance and data reliability than power consumption what hard drives would you recommend to buy?
- The intel 320ssd performance is nice but looking at performance benchmarks I think it can be improved. What would you do?
a) Get a second intel 320 120GB for setting a raid 0 (that would include a many hours of re-installing everything)
b) Get a Vertex 3 120gb too and clone the intel using it for swap and not so critical apps
c) Wait until prices drop more ad get a larger SSD next year

Thank you in advance for your advice

Nick

 

[mbahr]

Good questions!

I assumed that since Raid 1 is just a mirror and has no parity or striping going on it that there would be NO hardware dependance from the controller... you could take one of the drives and put it into any computer and it would work just fine. I've never tested it on my Raid 1 arrays (I hope never to have to!) and so am interested in hearing from others about it.

I don't see the benefit of setting up a Raid array with SSD's unless you are really, really, really in need of fast access. Or bragging rights (which is totally a good reason).