New to Raid stuff

[zonkie]

Ok, when I built my PC I was a little strapped for cash and at the time my budget allowed for a 120GB HD.

I want to get a second and use them in Raid, where they are the same disk and are faster. I think that is raid 0?

Anyway. Should I get another 120 GB that matches it or can I get a larger one and split the drive. I have another 80 GB drive i use for storage so I don't really need something huge.

Thanks for the suggestions

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can use a larger drive, however only the equal amounts on each drive will be used. So if you got a 320GB drive, on most controllers only 120GB on each one could be set up as an array. (I think Intel's Matrix RAID might also allow you to make use of the extra 200GB as a non-RAID drive, but I'm not sure. I'm certain nobody else does.) Also the performance of the two drives would be the same as if you had two of the older drive, since the newer, presumably better drive would have to wait around for the other drive to do its work (probably only a few percent difference in performance, not anything noticeable, but don't go thinking you can buy a new drive and see any better performance than if you bought an older one).

Easiest solution is to just get another of the same drive, since it'll be cheap, and you'll have pretty massive storage space that way. RAID0 is striping and is the way to go for performance, but you are in fact also doubling the chances that you'll have a failure, since now you have two drives that might fail, and if one drive goes, you lose everything, so make sure you have a backup method and that you do it regularly.