Two hard drive setup question

I would like to set up 2x 500gb hard drives in my computer but am a little unsure what raid means and if I need it to run two drives.

Please could somebody take a moment to explain what it is, if it is needed and whether I will need any extra hardware to get it up and running. Are there any other things that I should be aware of?

Thanks for any help,
Jason.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs. It means having more than 1 hard drive in a computer. There are various flavors of RAID:

0 or Striped: This writes data at the same time to both drives in a stripe pattern. This is the fastest mode available, but if one drive fails, you lose all your data.

1 or Mirror: The same as having one drive in your computer, but the same data is written to both drives, so in case one fails, you have a backup.

There's also 0+1, and 4 I think.

As for hardware, I think it you just need to configure it with Windows after you physically install the drive. I'd check on that one though.

Hope that helps.

Don't worry about RAID with a 2 drive setup, it isn't necessary unless you have particular requirements. SATA motherboards typically support 4 hard disks irrespective of RAID. Some support 2 and some 8, so you're fine.

As Ubergeek says RAID 0 can be used to give faster performance by sharing read/write operations across multiple disks simultaneously - this is a bit of a fools errand however as soon or later one HD is going to mess up and then you have to zap the lot and start over, even if its just a soft-error, the increase chance of dataloss is about 300%.

RAID 1 is great for data redundancy and saving your data but it wastes drive space by making your second drive a clone of the first. If your data is mission critical it is useful, otherwise it's just pure waste.

RAID 5/ RAID 10 and so on are only useful in a 4 or more drive array, because of noise/power/cost this is typically the domain of servers.

EDIT: Also note, multi-drive RAID arrays are effectively useless unless you also purchase the backup drive you will use if it ever fails. I've lost count the number of times i've seen a RAID install lose a drive (if its a 4 times array, it's 400% as likely + chance of soft errors, so ~425%). Many RAID controllers are designed such that the array remains unuseable until the drive is replaced and the data rebuilt, so the expensive array is effecitvely useless - especially in cases where it fails years after install. If you're ever setting up a big RAID array, always physically install an extra, unconnected, drive.

If you dont know what RAID is then you obviously want to simply expand your drive space by 2x500gb, so just forget about RAID.

yesterday i installed a 1tb sata hard drive, thought windows would auto find it etc (been years since i had to do this and even then that was building em from scratch)

all i wanted was a stonkingly huge drive (although its listed as 931gb due to the 1000/1024k issues) and this is going to house all my mp3's and the odd dvd that will copy to save me faffing with disc swaps (like the 14 disc robotech that sounded like it shouldnt be sounding like that, thankfully it allowed me to play from hard drive so it was only nasty for the time it took to copy instead of the whole damn disc)

i thought sata was daisy chained but it wernt, but i had a second port so i aint mithred

and ive still got my external for backups

So if I did want to setup RAID I do not need any extra hardware?

Jason.

Does your motherboard support RAID?

Yes. Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD.

So even if I use two drives I do not have to use RAID at all? I assume one will contain the OS and the other is just used as extra space?

Jason.

If you don't use raid and have vista, it can be worth having a page file on both disks since vista dynamicly switches between the two depending on what tasks are being performed in the BG, if one drive is sitting idle it will use that drive instead of the one thats under heavy stress.