raid? and hard drive?

Question

my motherboard is set up for raid. What is it? And should i get it. Thanks. My manual for the motherboard doesnt tell me anying about it just how to install the software for it. Also i have a pretty old hard drive its 40 gigs but its probably 9 years old should i get a new one. And what kind? Thanks to all.

Answer 1

To use RAID, you need to start with two new identical drives. Raid-0 is called striping where it writes alternately to one drive, then the other. Your drives are able to access faster because each drive is accessing part of your data at the same time.

RAID-1 will use the second drive as a mirror drive and writes the same data as on the first drive for redundancy. There are other configurations too. In RAID 0, your storage capacity is the total of the two drives, in RAID1, your total capacity is the same as one drive.

Answer 2

RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

What it does, depending the the RAID level, is allow you to have fault tollerant disks in that if one fails, the other(s) have the data you would have lost if you only had one disk.

In a mirrored raid configuration, you would have two disks. The controller writes information to both and if one were to fail, it would automatically continue going with the other drive.

You could continue using your older drive, and if so, it would be size to set up RAID in case the older one fails. :)

Answer 3

if ur going to do raid its best to have two (or more) brand new harddrives of the same make and size .... and yes ... especially if u load ur operating system on a raid settup it gives a major performance increase ... raid shares the load on reading and writing files to increase speeds ..and adding more than two to an array increases the speed that much more ..but most only use two honestly ... i run 2 10000rpm raptors in a mirror and it rocks ..