RAID what?

[solidsteve]

ok i've been looking into the pc that i'm building and read something about RAID

now from what i found on the web it is either a hardware or software thing where it makes two (or more) HDD's look like and act like one

anyone got anymore information on it because in my mind i'm still running on the master - slave set-up of the IDE

 

[atomic tofu]

there are many flavors of raid

the dual drive setup where data is "striped" across both drives, each drive working less, moving faster - raid 0 (all data is loss if 1 drive fails)

the one where 1 drive is the main and another acts as mirror redundancy - raid 1

0, 1, 5 functionality are usually a part of on board raid chipsets, and others available via dedicated cards

RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[solidsteve]

ok thanks

reading though the information on the link i have a few new questions

i have 2 500gb western digital drives i'm going to put in raid 0 so i can get a lot of space out of them but would it show up as 1 hdd or 2

how much space would i get out of them, i don't want mirrored drives all the stuff i put on the hdd's i can get again

last thing is how likely are errors or foults, the 2 hdd's are brand new going on to a brand new DS3R

 

[atomic tofu]

raid 0 will add all your gb together

I would suggest if you do this, you invest in an upc of some sort
raid 0...no fault tolerance. Again...additional suggestion, a 3rd drive for regular backups. You will be screwed royally if no backup for this raid 0

if you have perfect drivers this might be ok...I have an ATI gpu...eh

 

[solidsteve]

raid 0 will add all your gb together

I would suggest if you do this, you invest in an upc of some sort
raid 0...no fault tolerance. Again...additional suggestion, a 3rd drive for regular backups. You will be screwed royally if no backup for this raid 0

if you have perfect drivers this might be ok...I have an ATI gpu...eh

upc? what's one of them when its at home

i'm going for a 3870 X2 so i kind of guess a 3rd drive would be good thinking but how would that work and what size would i need

i might go for raid 1 but i would like to use the space

 

[atomic tofu]

you can do raid 0 and do backups manually
I'm not sure what you are doing...but let's say you are using the documents folder to store all your work. At the end or during...you can manually just ctrl+c and ctrl+v into the backup drive.

the backup wouldn't need to be as big as the total, since it would just be for the needed files, not the system or whatever else.

my bad on typo oversight, ups not upc...
Newegg.com - UPS, Surge Suppressors, Backup Power Supply, Surge Protectors, Power Strips

 

[solidsteve]

ok a ups is a big battery got ya

i'm gaming on my pc, i'm going to get loads of them and just put them onto the hdd, i'm also going to be putting plenty of music on it as well

i would have all the disks for everything (apart from cs3 wink wink ) so if it blows it still good to go

 

[atomic tofu]

feh, raid 0 for games and music?
editing videos and stuff is more of a use for it