RAID 0 is striping across two discs. It improves performance at the expense of reliability (your data integrity depends on two drives, so a failure in either results in total loss, doubling your chances of losing your data).

RAID1 is mirroring for data integrity - two separate copies of your system are kept on two different hard drives.

RAID5 is the best of both worlds - striping with redundancy. Unfortunately it requires three drives and isn't supported by most desktop systems.

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
or Redundant Array of Independent Disks

I found this to be a good website for explaining all the RAID levels (0-6, 10, 50, 0+1).

Rioe.

See if the following can help.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/

Bev.

 

Thank you for the responses, but how do I know if my drive supports Raid in the first place or my mother board? I have the 8400 system 160 Gb SATA maxtor .

Message Edited by Rioe on 02-12-2005 03:57 PM

The board supports RAID natively. You need a pair of matched (same model) SATA drives to use RAID.

I'd like to setup Raid1 (mirrored) would I do this in Bios or Windows disc management? If this can be done, would this be software or hardware based too? Thanks

slyone

It would help to post the computer model and version of windows.

To install RAID, you may need to reinstall the operating system, etc.

Bev.





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Thanks Bev, It's a 4700 w/XP home. I'm just going to use a new drive w/ an external also.

slyone

The D-4700 does not support RAID, you will need to buy a PCI RAID controller.

Bev.





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