RAID, worth it? Reliable?

[ironhell]

Is RAID really worth it? I have two EIDE 200 gig drives from Western Digital and I am debating if I want to bother spending $$$ getting a RAID card to set it up... Basically I want to use these two as my data storage drives for music, movies etc. I currently have two 80 gig hard drives and plan on keeping one of them as my app/windows drive and the other as *shrugs* SOMETHING drive (one of them is a 5400 rpm so I might get an enclosure and set it up as an external hd).
Before I go on with RAID, I would like to know how RELIABLE it really is... I mean, where is all the info for the RAID setup stored at? Windows? Does that mean if I ever wipe out my windows and have to reinstall, I lose my RAID and therefore all the data on my 2x200 gig hd? What would cause me to lose all my info other than failure of one or both of the drives? Thanks.

IronHell

 

[jihiggs]

i dont trust the windows software raid. its very fragile. i have used 2k pro for a raid 5 array. the server lost power and i lost about 10 files on the hard drives. i would only trust it for mirroring, not striping.

wpdclan.com cs game server - 69.12.5.119:27015

 

[sjonnie]

Strange place to put this question. Harddisk forum would have been better.

The RAID0 build information is stored in the MBR of disc0 of your array so if you have a partition with Windows in it you can safetly format that and the rest of your RAID0 will be fine. Nothing than an actual drive failure will cause your data to be lost. Even if the MBR became corrupted, you can simply rebuild the array from the controller card BIOS and recover the partitions using a suitable recovery program.

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