can anyone explain to me what a RAID 0 RAID1-RAID10 is, im not a wiz on pc's but what's up with this RAID'S and SATA'S if anyone can help me plz. thankz
Hi there, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Basically it is a method for combining multiple hard drives into one hard drive to yield increased performance or data backup. SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. It is an interface for hard drives similar to IDE/Parallel ATA, although it offers increased bandwidth (it's faster). So if you have a SATA controller on your motherboard or a SATA PCI card, it is likely that it will support a RAID level. Those RAID numbers you mentioned are called levels. RAID 0 (also known as 'striping') is used to connect 2 or more hard drives to use as one hard drive with double capacity (so long as the drives are the same size) and increased speed due to being able to write and read from both drives simultaneously. ALL DATA will be lost if even just one of the drives fails. RAID 1 (also known as 'mirroring') combines 2 or more hard drives to provide data protection. The two drives will together have the capacity of the smallest drive. However,the data written to the RAID set (the two drives) is mirrored so that if one drive fails the data is still available on the other drive. RAID 10 is a combination of both which requires 4 drives. 2 of the drives will be used for striping, 2 for mirroring. Basically you get one virtual drive with double the size of the smallest drive, and extra performance. You also get data protection due to mirroring. However, it is a costly solution, requiring 4 hard drives. Alternatively, you could have just done a google search
What it all boils down to is, are you after speed or redundancy? If you want raw data performance, for handling large files like video for example, then RAID0 is the way to go. If you have important data that needs to be kept at all costs then RAID1. If both, then RAID10. Generally, the more disks in a RAID array the better,
well that helps alot,Im actually looking for both speed and redundancy i wanna be able to access my files quick and able to store big files of data.So i would have to go with RAID 10 is that what u suggest? thanx for the help
Raid 1+0 and 0+1 are the best options if you need both, but for these you need at least four disk drives. If you can afford that, then great, but you'll need an advanced motherboard or a separate S-ATA RAID card.
@nina You said you want speed and large drives? As long as you don't have crucial data that you will suffer without, RAID0 is the way to go. There's only one major problem with RAID0, if you have a 300 GB HD, and a 80 GB HD, and you set them up RAID0, you will only have 160GB's of disc space. Raid multiplies the smallest drive by the number of drives, if you have 2 300GB HD's though, you would have 600GB's of space with 2x the speed. But then you would have 2x the fail rate as well. RAID1 is for users that ABSOLUTELY CANNOT lose their data. If you are like most people, HD's don't really crash that often, and oh well you might lose some files, then go RAID0... RAID0 starts to sound even better with a 3rd 300GB HD, because you'd be approaching TB with roughly 3X the speed of one drive!
