i'm a litttle lost

[thebattosai]

this is my first build and i was wondering,

what is the RAID function? can someone make it simple for me?

 

[uzi9mm]

using multiple hard drives to either increase performance, and or redundancy.

RAID = Redundant Array of Independent Disks

 

[thebattosai]

increase performance how?.......

 

[kfc469]

well, it will be faster because you will be able to access two or more files at almost the same time because you have more than one hdd. With only one, you have to wait for the hdd to spin around to the file you want, but if you have 3 drives, that time is cut in 3. also, you get the storage of each drive. so if you get 4 250gb hdd's and raid them, they would appear to windows as one 1tb drive

 

[thebattosai]

i have 2 320 SATA drives.....which function would be best?

RAID 0, RAID 1, Or JBOD?

 

[thebattosai]

also...i am no including a floppy drive in my new build....

is there any other way i can load the SATA RAID drivers when installing windows xp?

 

[thebattosai]

?????

 

[baronvongogo]

Be patient people are in work or in bed , Personally I don't know if you can install raid drivers on a cd or USB pen. I Don't think its worth it either, unless you want to back up everything all the time or to get a little extra performance.

I don't use raid mainly as I just backup files I need so i can put other things in the rest of the space.

 

[bobojuice]

Raid 0 increases performance by writing consecutively to both drives. For instance, lets say the data is the alphabet and you have two drives. The data would be then written as follows; Disk1>A, Disk2>B, Disk1>C, Disk2>D, and so on and so forth. Now, while this does create a faster read and write it also means that you have an inherently unsafe setup. If one disk fails on the stripe, the stripe is then broken and your data is corrupt.

Raid 0 also allows you to combine the storage space of 2 drives into one logical drive. So if you have 2 300gb drives in a raid 0, you will see only one 600gb disk.

Raid 1 is primarily used for redundancy. Where in raid 0 you write one bit to each drive consecutively, in Raid 1 the disk writes to the first drive and copies the data to a second redundant drive. If one of the drives fails at any point in time you have a backup copy of all your data on a second drive, which usually will take over the instant the first one fails. One drawback of this is the size of hdd to cost ratio. If you have 2 300gb drives your system will only see 1 300gb drive. However, if your data is that important to you it's sometimes worth a little extra money for data safety.

If you want to learn more about raid and its different benefits/cons and configurations visit http://www.acnc.com/04_00.html.

 

[thebattosai]

wow. Thanks alot. You really simplified everything. Now, i'm ready to build.