Raid

[nabeels786]

lets say i have 1 60gb hd, that almost full. if i get another hd, and but them both into a raid array...will i loose any of my dad?

and lets say that 60gb was partition as 55|5, with xp on the 55 and 2k on 5, will i loose anything then?

just wondering

[Guv]

RAID has to be established when the disks are empty. If is done as part of the basic setup, even before the OS is installed.

Except for very special applications, RAID 0 is not a good idea, and the more advanced variations of RAID are not usually supported by PC motherboards.

RAID 0 allows you to use two identical hard disks as one huge disk. You get twice the tranfer rate, but pay with extra latency time. You get faster disk I/O if most of your applications tranfer large amounts of data with each I/O order, but it is slower for smaller amounts of data.

The extra speed is obtained by writing/reading chunks of data alternately to the two disks. Chunks 1, 3, 5, 7 . . . to the first disk, and chunks 2, 4, 6, 8 . . . to the second disk. Some systems allow a similar scheme with 3 or more disks (I do not think any PC motherboard supports more than two disk in a RAID 0 cionfiguation).

If anything goes wrong with either disk or the motherboard, recovering the data is a night mare. It is very difficult to install the disks on another system if something goes wrong with your Motherboard.

Fragmentation causes a lot of trouble with RAID 0 disks.

Another simple RAID variation allows two or more disk to be exact duplicates of each other. Writing puts the data on all disks. Reading reads from the multiple disks and compares the data. It is used for systems requiring extreme levels of data integrity.

There are systems which combine the above two types of RAID, getting data integrity due to redundancy and speed due to the alternate writes & reads. You need a minimum of 4 identical disk for this.

There are disks which are syncronized to avoid the latency problems mentioned above.

[jim mcnamara]

You can use other Raid technolgoies with PC's, especially when it becomes cost effective, as in a network server. But Guv is right - for a single PC, raid is probably overkill.

Full discussion -

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci214332,00.html