ppl here are often confused about it, so i think a guide may be useful.... we'll do this thing like we did for the techies bible, for those who weren't here when we wrote taht, first we did a pretopic for a "rough-draft" and then, I'll do the real thing later, so i don't have to go thru the hassle of editing later:
RAID0- Uses a min of two disks (can be used with two different sized HD's, resulting in the array's size being doubled of the smallest sized drives (or multiplied how many drives u use) Example, use a 250gb and a 160gb HD for a RAID array, and the arrays size will be 320GB or (160 x 2) This uses increased performance which is useful for a gaming and a cheap alternative for Raptor X or Cheetah in CAD builds, however faults are possible as if one hard drive fails, the data from both drives are gone (also called striping)
RAID1- Uses a minimum of 2Hard Drives, used to provide extra data security, used when ur data is crucial and really important (insert situation here) however, u get the capacity of 1 of the HD if u look in My Computer, the other disk will not be seeing and acting as a “mirror” of the first HD, however a person must remember RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A BACKUP!!! If you get infected with a virus remember the other drive will clone it too!
RAID5- Uses a minimum of 3 Hard Drives, and gives some performance (not as much as RAID0+1 or RAID0, but still performance boost, also cheap alternative to Raptor X’s or Cheetah SCSI Drives, while also doing a security, if one hard drive fails the array build itself after u replace the failed drive
right now i put the 3 basic levels (if ppl want me to go thru the others like the complex ones, like RAID0+1 or RAID1+0 etc etc, i will go thru those as well)