RAID comes in several levels: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 0+1. For home use, you are probably only interested in levels 0 (speed) or 1 (safety).
RAID is usually handled transparently by a hardware RAID controller. The software thinks it is talking to a single disk. Software-only RAID is a rather dangerous feature to use in Win2K.
RAID comes in several levels:
| RAID Levels | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| RAID Level | Minimum
Number of Disks Needed |
What it Buys You | How It Works |
| 0 | 2 | extra speed | interleaved striping |
| 1 | 2 | extra reliability | hot mirror backup |
| 2 | 2 | extra reliability | Hamming code ECC disks. No commercial implementation exists. |
| 3 | 3 | extra reliability | parity info enables correcting errors on the fly |
| 4 | 3 | extra reliability | shared parity disk |
| 5 | 3 | extra reliability | stripes both data and parity info |
| 6 | 4 | extra reliability | Independent data disks with two independent parity |
| 10 | 4 | extra reliability and speed | striping and mirroring |
| 50 | 4 | extra reliability and speed | Ganging RAID 0 and 3 together. |
| 0+1 | 4 | extra reliability and speed | Ganging RAID 0 and 1 together. |
For home use, you are probably only interested in levels 0 (speed) or 1 (safety).
With a SATA (Serial ATA) drive, you need a SATA-capable, RAID-capable motherboard or add-on PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) SATA controller. You can also use SATA on a single disk without RAID. SATA drives are pretty well standard now. Of course, for RAID , you have the added expense of twice as many drives.
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