hey i am kinda noob so plz bare with me. i found some RAID thingy in my bios settings and not sure what it is. then i looked on my mobo i found that there is a place to put my 2 hdds in raid slot 1 and 2 up to 4. so i did some reseaarch and was wondering if i shuld do this. i have XP on my 300GB sata with a 250GB off to the side and just put some random files on it and is NOT in RAID. i was wondering if i shuld because i read somewhere it is safer but im wondering if it is worth all the trouble?
i'm kinda a noob with RAID too but i do know a bit about it, it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks click here is puts things in an easy to understand way
if you have 2 identical drives (same size) u could put it on raid 1 (mirrored) this means that you could only use one drive and the other drive is like an image of the first drive, so if your computer crashes, your data is still there on the mirrored drive. Also, raid 0 (striped) basically, this just makes your two drives into one big drive. but this has greater speed than raid 1. I don't know if you can avail of RAID if you have 2 drives with different capacities though. I thought RAID stood for Redundant Array of Independent Disks? I could be wrong though
RAID= Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks It's a means via hardware and/or software of combining hard drives to act as one big drive and/or silently mirror one drive. The catch involves a multiple of the smallest disk in the array, so, you'd be missing 50GB out of what you have now. For real performance, you'd want to have a designated hardware RAID card, which doesn't rely on drivers to operate. These are the cards that cost $300, so what you have on your motherboard is RAID, but it's software RAID, and despite what some people say, you're not going to benefit by using a RAID 0 array. If you're worried about data security, RAID 1 could be beneficial. RAID 0 works by writing across all the drives in the array as if it's one big ol' hard drive. It writes bit 1 to drive 1, bit 2 to drive 2, bit 3 to drive 1, bit 4 to drive 2, etc. Unlike other RAID levels, there is NO fault tolerance, and if one drive bites it, kiss everything good by, because you've lost parts of every bit of data in the array. RAID 1 is mirroring. This writes the same data to both drives in the array. Bit 1 is written to both drive 1 and 2, bit 2 is written to both drive 1 and 2, bit 3 is written to both drive 1 and 2, etc. If one drive goes, you've got a back up where you left off. The main disadvantage is that since the data is being written twice at the same time, there is a performance hit. There's also other RAID levels, but RAID 0 and 1 are the most common. Having said that, if you choose to run RAID 0, you will destroy the data on both drives when the array is created. RAID 1 can also have detrimental effects if you mirror the wrong drive. Have fun and play around with it if you want, but back up before you start fiddling around with it.
Both of you guys are right. Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks [link=http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html]webopedia[/link] [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks]wikipedia[/link]
I wouldnt be surprised, im only 13! lol. also, there are other RAID options: Raid 1, raid 0, raid 0+1, raid 5, raid 15, JBOD (just a bunch of disks) also, intel has this cool option where you can take a part of your raid and turn that into raid 1 and have the rest on raid 0 (250gigx2 hd, raid 1 100gig from each and raid 0 the rest)
