What is RAID?

[geckoman]

I see it mentioned a lot in reference to hard drives, but don't understand what it is.

I am running a Raptor drive right now, with a couple other IDE HDD's for music, movies, docs etc.

How would I benefit from RAID?

 

[defakto]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

and by our moderator douglite

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=952998

 

[unhappy_mage]

How would you benefit? Well, in terms of performance, running raid 0 (the preferred drug of choice for ubar eleet gamorz) gains you a lot in synthetic benchmarks but practically nothing in real-world usage. However, if you have a lot of similar-sized hard drives for media storage, raid 5 may be a good choice for you. It gives you redundancy of one disk, so even if something happens to one disk you won't lose data. Write speeds aren't great, but you need a lot less than you'd think for media storage.

Also, although the diagrams on the ACNC page are pretty, I wouldn't trust them. Their "advantages" of raid 50 is pretty bad - raid 50 is no more redundant than raid 5, for example - and their diagram for raid 10 is just plain wrong, and their definition of raid 1 is (I believe) incorrect for more than 2 disks (I don't think I know of any controllers which do duplexing - make a 4 disk raid 1 and you get the same data mirrored on 4 disks!). The wikipedia article is much better.