Raid

[littlewill]

HI,

I always thought RAID was backing up of data from one pc to another. I have heard that some motherboards have RAID on it. Is this the same thing?



littlewill

[Sid Vicious]

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Important(?) Data.

It's basically running two hard drives next to each other to improve speed and reliabilty. You can stripe (2 hard drives running as one to theoretically double speed) or mirror (both are identical in case of failure).

There's other RAID methods too, but that's the (convoluted) basics of it

[Dorza]

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Important(?) Data.

Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks


The idea with RAID is to spread data across many disks, seamlessly. The benifit of this in general is that multiple disks working together perform much more quickly than a single disk. The downside of using multiple disks to store data is, that there is more chance of a disk failure. RAID can be used in lots of ways not just how i mentioned above. Each useage of RAID is divided up in to "levels":

RAID 0:

Data in this level is striped (spread) across multiple disks. However if one disks fails data on all the other disks will be lost aswell. This level is good for improving performance and should only be used for non essensial data.

RAID 1:

Data in this configuration is "mirrored" across disks. Two disks are used instead of one and data between the two disks is synchronized between the disks. If one disks fails the other disk continues to work untill the failed disk can be replaced.


RAID 0 and 1 are probably the most common levels (RAID can go up to level 10) found on motherboard which have a on board RAID controler.

More information can be found here.

This is probably more of a hardware topic rather than a software one