The Art of RAIDing

Those wishing for higher hard drive performance would "stripe" their drives into a configuration known as RAID 0. The simplest form of RAID 0 takes two identical hard drives and pairs them into one new drive. Half the data is stored on one drive and the other half is stored on the second drive. Data is "striped" off both drives at the same time, making it run twice as fast in theory. The down side to this performance is if one drive should go bad, you will lose all your data because your comp can't work with only half an operating system. RAID 0 is not recommended if you store mission critical data in your computer.

For those who want an extra measure of protection for their data, there is RAID 1. RAID 1 sets up your drives as mirrors of each other. Whatever is saved on one drive is also saved on the other. Should one drive die, you have a complete backup on the other drive. The disadvantage of RAID 1 is there is no performance increase. As a matter of fact, performance is a bit below a single drive because of the extra resources needed to run the 2nd drive. Also you don't get any extra hard drive space. Two 40 gig hard drives in RAID 1 holds the same data as a single 40 gig drive.

For those who want a performance increase and safety of data, the Iwill SIDE-RAID offers RAID 0+1. In this setup, FOUR hard drives are used. Two of the drives are striped in a RAID 0 setup and the other pair are striped to mirror the first pair. The down side of this is the extra cost of adding so many hard drives.

For this review, I decided to set up a RAID 0 system since I'm a performance nut who is always searching for more speed.

Next page: Installation

[Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4] [Home]