RAID : What? How?

[imported_cuddles]

If anyone has any links or explanations as to what RAID is and how it works, I'd appreciate it. I hear about it, but know nothing about it in detail. I'll be getting (most likely) 2x 74GB Raptor and 2x 160GB Maxtor, wondering if I can increase performance, or anything, by using RAID at all. If someone can explain RAID, and how it's done, what it does to me, I'd be very thankful 🙂

 

[myocardia]

RAID level 0 (the only one that gives you much greater speed than a single disk) works like this: Windows sees two disks as one disk that equals the size of both drives combined. The processor/memory "write" to the first disk, until it's cache is full, then start writing data to the second disk. If you only had one disk, then they wouldn't be able to send anything at all until the disk's cache was emptied (written out onto the disk, in other words). This doesn't quite double your read/write speed, but comes fairly close, although at twice the cost (but also at twice the storage space).

 

[John]

Storagereview: Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)

 

[imported_cuddles]

Thank you, I'll be reading this all at work tomorrow 🙂