What is RAID?

[Moltnrok]

This is kind of a 2 part question. The first one is: Can anyone explain to me what "RAID" is? I know it has something to do with running dual HD's, but what? What kinds of benefits come with RAID?
Somebody straighten me out on this whole RAID thing PLEASE?!?!

2nd question is: what is the difference in these boards from IWill?
KA-266 R
KA-266
KK-266 R
KK-266
I thought the difference was the RAID controller, but that would only explain 1/2 of my confusion. The 'R' denotes RAID right? then what is the difference between the KA and KK?

-------------------------
Mustang, this is Voodoo 1 requesting flyby...?

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Moltnrok,

Well, here goes:

RAID stands for one of two things depending on who's camp your in: Redundant Array of Independant Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

RAID allows one to setup a bank of disks to appear as one disk to the OS or it can be used to seamlessly mirror the main disk for reasons of redundancy. There are many flavors of RAID, but the common ones offered for home use are RAID 0,1 or 0+1.

RAID 0 uses striping which stores part of a file across many disks. This takes advantange of the additional read and write heads to increase the overall speed that the system can access data from ROM. Since two drives are used the dangers of failure increase and if one drive goes bad the whole array must be repaired before it can be used.

RAID 1 uses mirroring which simpy copies everything done on the primary drive to the secondary drive. Should the first drive fail, the system can quickly use the second mirror. The system gains no speed increase, and may in fact get a performance hit due to the time required to copy data.

RAID 0+1 uses a combination of the two to increase performance and reduce the danger of drive failure; however, it requires 4 disks...minimum.

As far as the Iwill boards, you are correct in that the R stands for RAID. The difference between them is that the KA266 uses DDR RAM only and the KK266 uses PC133 RAM.

Here is a good link for more information.

 

[Moltnrok]

Thanks for the explanation Starcutter. You've done a lot to get me straightened out.
Thanks
moltnrok

 

[ku]

does this mean i dont really need raid if I'm not going to use dual hard drives?