PC hardware: RAID 0 or 1

(NT) What's the benefit (to you) of (working as one) ???

Intel MatrixRaid can provide 0 and 1

If your motherboard is based on the intel 925, 945, 955, or 975 chipset and you're getting SATA drives, you should have Intel MatrixRaid. With MatrixRaid, you can run both Raid 0 and 1 on just two drives.

I've got the first 40gb of my two 160s mirrored (raid 1) for data protection. The mirror (C:) holds is the boot device, and stores the OS, apps, My Documents, etc.). The remaining 100gb or so is striped (raid 0). D: stores the page file, temp folder, game files, dvd/cd rips, web browser cache, downloaded stuff, etc... anything that I don't care if its lost or i want fast read performance.

One vs Multiple..............................

Over the 10+ past years we have built hundreds/thousands of PC/Servers. Only the best PC systems and all Servers used RAID setups. I, personally, run RAID0 and have for years..........I'm seriously contemplating going with a single large drive in a future system for these reasons:

2 harddrives doubles your odds of drive failure

In RAID0, the system is faster as both drives work as one..............however, then you need a 3rd drive for backup (now you have 3 drives that can go bad)

In RAID 1 the second drive is a copy of the first and you actually don't gain much performance

Less hard drives equal less system heat, less voltage requirements, less chance of failure, less noise, less cooling, etc.

The new drives are fast and quiet and not much slower than RAID0 setups (not enough to make a difference except in one case):

Using WD Raptor Drives (10,000) in RAID setup can and will speed up your performance a good 33% if the REST of your system is designed for speed also (the only option I would consider)..expensive, but the best/fastest is never cheap

I could go on but I think you get the idea....the new big hard drives have a fast seek/read/write time, gobs of cache (8MB/16MB0 are huge (hundreds of Gigs) and really aren't necessary to be setup in a RAID configuration for a high performance system. If you want fast, get the 150G WD Raptor (10,000rpm, 16MB cache), set two up in RAID0 and use a third for backup....that would be screamingly fast...............

Why did you need 500G of HDD space? That's a tremendous amount when you could use a separate tower for storage(server) and use your new PC as a workstation......................

(NT) it took you 2.5 years to compose that scathing reply?

Keeping it simple

If you want a single 500GB drive, use RAID0.

If you want dual copies of the same 250GB, use RAID1.

The question you need to ask yourself is if you want additional data security or just speed.

If you don't care about your data being safe at all times, and have no real reason for using a single 500GB drive (I can't think of anything), then RAID might be pretty much useless, as you'll most probably just suffer a performance decrease during write operations, while reading might be accelerated slightly.

Real advantages of the RAID system do not really manifest themselves before RAID5, and that requires 4 disks. Even then I'd mostly recommend it for people with mission-critical data they can't realistically duplicate onto other media (CDs/DVDs/tapes) or need constant access to.

To RAID or not to RAID

Unless you are deeply concerned about speed and/or reliability, two seperate drives isnt so bad, its just the one extra drive letter and while there is no redundancy in doing this, there isnt any in RAID 0 either. If you really dont want to have the extra drive letter to mess about with when storing data, depending on your OS, JBOD may be a viable alternative.

JBOD in the opposite way to partitioning, using several smaller disks to make a larger disk.

Personally i would just use the 2 drives as just that, two separate drives with two separate drive letters in windows.