What is RAID?

[blawblaw]

Haha, I always see this in people's setups. What is it exactly? What do you need in order to use it?

 

[outrunner]

The most popular Raid levels are;

Raid 0 = data stripped across several hdu's - Fast read/write

Raid 1 = Mirrored data - more tolerant of hdu crash as data is backed up on another drive(s)

Raid 10 = a stripped & mirroed array - expensive

Raid 5 = Data distrubited across all drives with parity checking, if a single drive fails in the array the remaining drives can 'rebuild' the new drive

Take a look here for somemore info http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/

or

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

To use it you need a mobo with a raid controller or a pci/scsi raid controller, plus 2 or more hdu's and space to to mount them in your PC or external enclosure

 

[Dav0s]

RAID is different ways of setting up 2 or more SATA hard drives for either faster access, safer data or a collection of the two.

 

[bloodthirst]

have a look at this http://sysxtreme.com/showthread.php?t=2298 should be helpful to you

 

[FragTek]

RAID is different ways of setting up 2 or more SATA hard drives for either faster access, safer data or a collection of the two.

For that matter they could also be IDE (PATA) drives as well just to clarify.

Dave pretty much summed up RAID quite well in one sentence.

 

[nathan]

well, they could be any sort of hard drive standard, hell they've even created a RAID using solid state memory such as USB flash pens.