RAID question.

[covana]

Can someone explain the difference between raid 0, 1, and 5 to me? I heard with raid 0 that if you use let say two 40gb harddrives you get 80gb of space. But I also heard that with raid 1 that two 40gb harddrives will only give you 40gb of space. Is this true? What is the the advantage of raid 1 or 0 that would warrent the loss in space? I don't know must about raid 5 either.
Thanks
Kyle

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/...214332,00.html

[Jeordiewhite]

That is a nice site with information about raid.
However this one may be a bit easier to understand:
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html
For the most part, each version of raid has their advantages, however raid 0 and 1 require 2 disks and raid 3 and 5 will require a minumum of 3 disks.
Raid 1 would be great as you would be able to mirror the other drives data and easily retore the data incase of corruption or whatever.
Raid 5 will be striped and will take up about the same ammount as just one drive, the nice advantage would be you have enough information if one drive fails you could restore the failed disk.

[covana]

If I most just play games, and watch movies. What raid should I use?

[HeadBand]

raid 0...raid 1 is only if you have really important data

[Sixpac_XP]

Originally posted by covana
If I most just play games, and watch movies. What raid should I use?

None, you don't need raid for playing games or watching movies.. you will not see a difference and you will find it a pain to restore your system if the hard drives fail.

[Uncle Bob]

Just my $0.02... I got my MOBO at a really good price. It's a raid MOBO I using raid 0 stripped 2 40gb WD Hdds. You must keep in mind that if one of the drives hiccups or some thing. I loose ALL
that is on the drives. The raid system takes longer to boot. Not really a biggie just a bit annoying.

[Jeordiewhite]

Do you mean when the raid card posts?
You can disable assigning it an IRQ and it will stop and still work in windows unless your boot from it, otherwise leave it.
It gives you a few seconds, for me, I would think it absurd as a deciding factor of buying raid.
My main system is running windows server 2003 and it boots into windows moments after it gets passed the boot strap loader and goes through all the sequences there, the progress bar when starting up doesn't even go through one pass.
You don't need raid in your situation, but if you still feel you would like it, then there isn't much reason not to really if you have the resources to do so.
Raid 0 would probably be best, but make sure you back up your important data like documents and whatever else you enjoy, that way you dont end up losing it.