RAID : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

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RAID
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

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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