Gots a question bout RAID

[Gixxer420]

Okay I know that you can set up raid in mirrors. Isn't it true that you can set it up also as one big drive ( example= have two 80 gig drives would equal 160 in one drive) instead of 80 an 80 in two.

Does this make sense and can it be done that way.

[CiKoTiC]

No. RAID 0 and 1 are totaly different. RAID 0 is stripping. RAID 1 is mirroring.

RAID Level 0 (stripping) lets you use the combined space of two drives (you must have at least two drives). With two 40 gig drives, the data being saved is split between the drives thus eliminating any redundancy you would get with with a higher level RAID. Your total size of the disks would equal 80 GIGS to your OS.

The size of a RAID 0 array is dependent upon the size of the smallest disk in the array. The total size is equal to the size of the smallest disk in the array, multiplied by the number of disks. For example, for an array of three 1 GB disks and one 10 GB disk, the array size would be only 4 GB (smallest disk = 1 GB, x 4 disks = 4 GB), as the remaining 9 GB on the 10 GB disk cannot be accessed by itself. This is another reason why identical drives should always be used: to avoid loss of capacity. Link here. (http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/1611/2/)

With RAID 0, if you saved a 100MB file it would split in blocks and spread between the two drives. The advantage of this is when the file is accessed the data is read by both drives at the same time giving you faster access speeds. Best performance is achieved when data is striped across multiple controllers with only one drive per controller. The disadvantage is you get no redundancy and if a drive fails, you loose ALL your data.

If you use RAID 1 (Mirroring) with two 40 GIG drives, your total space would equal 40 GIGS because the data is 'copied' to the mirror drive. You do not get to combine the total space of the two drives. The advantage is redundancy. The disadvantage is you get zero improvement with read access and a huge hit to write times because the data has to be written twice.

Go here (http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html) or here (http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/1611/2/) if you want to get the skinny on all the different levels of RAID.

RAID 0 is good if your going to be accessing large files such as CAD or video. For every day home usage, it's a waste of money because a single high speed drive will give you the same performance. Or if you must have multiple drives, just partition them to increase access times.

If you absolutly have to have redundancy and an increase in access times for large files, go with RAID 1/0... if you have the money for four hard disks because that's what it's gonna take to use it. :)