RAID Help...

[drumthrasher]

I've been thinking lately, since I have 2 hard drives, and since, according to my computers documentation, supports RAID, and its supposed to make things quite a bit faster, I thought why not try it?

But, I don't know where to start. I've searched, i'm not sure what to do. Theres RAID 0, 15, 50, 1, I don't know which one to choose or how to do it...but the thing that worries me I guess is that if something happens to one hard drive everything is gone...maybe not? Please help me out on this, since Vista SP1 will be coming out in a month or so I figured since imma reinstall Vista why not do this?

 

[D-Lew]

If you are in RAID 0 the data is divided in parts along both drives so if one fails you basically lose it all. The other RAIDS are mostly for data backup purposes and are usually slower. Look at the Wikipedia entry on RAID and you will learn a lot about the different types there.

Another thing to check is are both your drives the same size/model/etc? RAID 0, which is the performance one, works best if everything is identical.

 

[drumthrasher]

According to my sig, its a 200GB and a 120GB...

Would I have to buy anything?

 

[an0nym0us1]

According to my sig, its a 200GB and a 120GB...

Would I have to buy anything?

it's HIGHLY recommended that you use HDD's of the same make, model and capacity. it will work with two mismatched drives, just not the ideal setup.

 

[drumthrasher]

According to wikipedia, level 1 seems ideal for me, but I don't know how about doing any of this.

 

[freestyler105]

Well, if you do RAID, you'll be losing 80 gigs of storage because it's limited to the size of the smallest drive.

RAID 1 will really not give you a performance increase. RAID 1 is made for backup purposes. Both the drives are exactly the same, so read speeds are faster (you can read from 2 drives at once) but write speeds stay the same (write to 2 drives at once). That's theoretically though. Write speeds will probably decrease.

RAID 0 is what you're thinking of as RAID. Both the drives are striped, so half the data is on one drive and half on the other. This allows the computer to be writing different data to each hard drive at once, making things a lot faster.