What is Raid?

[Punked Out Comp]

At the risk of sounding stupid I will. What is Raid 0 and 1 and all that stuff?

[Gibble]

RAID-0
RAID Level 0 is not redundant, hence does not truly fit the "RAID" acronym. In level 0, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping.

In other words, information gets split across 2 drives to speed up access speeds (hard drive speed in general) but if one of the drives fail you basicly lose everything.

RAID-1
RAID Level 1 provides redundancy by writing all data to two or more drives. The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost. This is a good entry-level redundant system, since only two drives are required; however, since one drive is used to store a duplicate of the data, the cost per megabyte is high. This level is commonly referred to as mirroring.

again in other words, it makes a copy and sticks it on another harddrive. A backup or ghost so to speak.

Added to that, you can use both together. Using 4 harddrives, you can strip the information giving you faster speeds, and make backups or copies of them to the extra set of hard drives just incase one of the first set goes bonkers.

Hope that helps.

[glc]

http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/296/

[mairving]

Here is the best RAID tutorial that I have seen.

[Punked Out Comp]

Thanks guys, that helps.