RAID CONFIGURATIONS
When setting up a raid configuration on a operating system you have various choices. A few years ago it was popular to set up what is called a stripe configuration. This would usually consist of two hard drives of equal size. They may have been two 80gb hard drives or two 160gb hard drives. The object was to make the two of them look like one big hard drive. The drawback to doing this was if something went wrong with one hard drive you would lose all your data. We don't see this much anymore because we have hard drives that are 500gb, 1tb or larger. There are some programs available to try and get the data or the other choice would be to send it out for data recovery by professionals. This choice can be very expensive. It could be $800 or more. Generally a business may go this route if the data is extremely important.
This video is from 2011 ,Software vs Hardware RAID by Anders Brownworth
The next type of raid configuration that is very common is a mirror raid. This is where two drives are installed in the computer. They are the same size hard drive such as two 250gb, 500gb or larger. The one hard drive is the main drive that the system boots off of. The second hard drive basically is an exact image of the first drive. This way if something goes wrong with one drive you still have all your data. You may be able to boot off the good drive if you longer want the mirror raid configuration. Also if you want the mirror raid to continue you can install another hard drive of the same size and run the raid program that comes up during the post test. You then enter the program and do what is called rebuild the mirrored raid array. I should note that not all raid programs have the rebuild choice. Now when you look in the system at the hard drives in my computer for example you will only see one hard drive listed. This is a good choice for a business. One drawback is that if you get a virus on one drive it will be on the other. So if you get the cryptolocker virus you will most likely lose everything.
This a pretty good basic explanation of various raid configurations
There are other raid configurations to choose from. They generally go from Raid 0 to Raid 6, but can go higher. There are various settings that will need to be set. Here is a link to a wikipedia page that will give some information on raid configurations. Just copy and paste the link in your address bar and press enter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID . Here is another link you can use as well http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/ . This article from PC Mag looks like a good one http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370235,00.asp .
So you will notice that the videos are generally a few years old. I myself feel that raiding drives is somewhat old school. Hard drives have become much larger, microprocessors have become a lot faster and memory has become larger in amount of space. We are at ddr3 and moving higher resulting in faster front side bus speeds. There are also better ways of backing up data and well as systems with redundant hard drive replacing.
Thank You for reading and stay safe.
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