Got a question about RAID

I posted a question on a different forum about if I should get another 80GB SATA150 HDD and RAID them or buy a larger capacity drive and use them individually. He damn near yelled through the computer DO NOT USE RAID!!!!!

Holy sh*t I thought, this guys got issues. What the hell is wrong with RAID? Anybody got an answer?

Well raid is explained here



There can be issues depending on what type of raid array you set up. If yo only have 2 drives then you are limited to raid0 or raid1

Raid0 will not improve performance or capacity, Essentially it just mirrors your hard drive onto another, so if one dies then the computer can just read smoothly from the other until you get chance to repair it. It aiimed mainly at servers



raid1 will improve performance slightly and capacity in line wth the size of additional hdd. Here data is split and different stripes are written to different hard drive. This can speed up both read and write times since both drives work (as in physically move) in parellel even. However if either drive fails you lose ALL you data. Backing up become important as you just doubled the odds of you hdd failing. And the performace gains arn't huge

So I should just get another HDD without RAID?

It upto you and dependent on what you do with you pc. If you a heavy user then you may see a difference. But for me, id just keep them seperate. Unless you want to raid0 of course, or want to look into the other kinds of raid arrays available

check out

RAID 101

For 95% of consumer users, RAID is generally useless. You're putting money into something you'll not get noticeable performance gains from. (the most common is with people suggesting RAID0 for gaming systems and dont realize that loading games is a random access operation which doesnt take advantage of RAID0)

you seem to have explained raid0 and raid1 backwards if i am not mistaken, just to let you know. please correct me if i am wrong