RAID questions

[ZeroBurn]

i'm currently using a 45gb 75GXP IBM HDD, and interested in getting another 45gb 75GXP hdd, and setting them up as a RAID setup. as i'm a newbie to raid completely, i'm going to need some info, can anyone help? =)

1. What is the difference between RAID 1, 0, 1+0, 5, etc ?
2. What would be the best controller, and what is this modded controller I keep hearing about?
3. I'm looking at a Promise controller, what's FastTrack, regular, etc ? i'm not quite sure what to look for here. what's better ?

any basic help on RAID will help me out a lot, thanks guys

 

[office boy]

Ars Technica: Skinny on RAID

 

[Topochicho]

In short with 2 drives all you can do is raid 0 or 5. 0 stripes and treats the 2 drives as one tht reads twice as fast(bit of overstatement but I did say the short of it). With 0 one drive dies you loose everything. 5 mirrors. Its cuts your total drive storage in half. Drive two exactly repeats everything on drive 1. Same suck speed as one drive, but no crash worries.

Or buy 2 more drives (total 4) and coombine the 2 for a safe but fast system

 

[office boy]

Topochicho, you better read the article too.

 

[ZeroBurn]

what would you reccommend for a 2 45gb 75GXP setup then? i think all i can really do is RAID 0, which will give me 45gb of total space and much faster read/acess times. or i can go for RAID 1 which will give me slightly higher read times and 45gb total, but not as much speed as RAID 0 will. and since this is just a regular home machine i should just go for pure speed in RAID 0 and forget about the RAID 1 mirroring. is this correct, or am i reading the article wrong?

the article doesn't talk about the mods, etc though. what should i be looking for here?

 

[office boy]

I don't know where you can get some good info on the mods, but for a home setup, two of those IBM's in RAID0 (stripped) would be nice and fast, and would be about 90GB.
Just hope one don't fail.

 

[ZeroBurn]

when you stripe it with RAID 0 you get the full 90gb, not just 45gb ?

the thing is i already have 1-45gb right now, so if that fails i'm screwed anyway. is the rate of failure higher or something when you use a RAID setup? it seems everyone's talking about how you're so screwed if you just lose one drive and it's over- but it's the same thing right now with anyone that has one hard drive. if your hard drive dies, you're screwed, simple as that. i don't think i know any _consumer_ that is willing to spend the bucks just to have a fail-safe of their drives. companies i understand since it's mission-critical data, but for a home system we all risk the same thing, if a drive dies you're screwed.