What is Hard disk RAID?

[fajardokier]

I don't get it. I just get that the raid makes the HDD fast. anyways. can you guys tell what it is? please be more specific. I din't even understand what Wikipedia said. And one more thing. Can I raid My HDD? I have 2 HDD the one has 160 GB and the other one has a 80. Be advice Its a 2 Physical HDD. I'm using desktop.

THANKS

 

[Sunius]

Wrong section really..

 

[jsc]

RAID requires identically sized hard drives.

RAID may hard drives faster. With 2 drives, you can either do RAID 0 where the system writes data alternately to both drives (speeds disk access) or RAID 1 where the data is copied to both drives (slower).

Then you have RAID 5 and higher where the data and error checking are spread across several drives. The whole point of RAID 5 is that when one drive fails, you can replace that drive and the whole system rebuilds itself. The disadvantage is that you effectively lose one drives' worth of storage. For example, a RAID 5 array of four 1 terabyte drives can only store 3 TB's of data.

You can do RAID's two ways:
1. It's built into many motherboards. Advantage - cheap. Disadvantage - not really portable; you will need another motherboard with an identical controller.
2. A dedicated RAID card. Advantage - fast and portable; you simply transplant the drives and card to a new computer. Disadvantage - more expensive.

 

[jsc]

This topic has been moved from the section Graphics & Displays to section Storage by Jsc