Phippsp said:
So what is a RAID array my friend keeps bringing up? What does it do and is it good or a bad thing?
There 2 type of raid that is comman for the normle home user.
RAID 0 stripping
RAID 1 mirroring
From my experience more people use RAID 0 for there home computer then RAID 1.
With Raid 0 you dont want to use 2 different size harddrive like one person sugested. I am pretty sure if you have a 20gb and 80gb and use raid 0 you will only get 40 gb of storage because it ignores the other 60gb in the 80gb but if you use 2 identicle harddrives like 2 80GB then you will get the full 160GB.
RAID 0 is when Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored.
RAID 1 is use to enhance performane on the other hand RAID 1 is for security reason. RAID 1 keeps a identicle copy of it self on the secound harddrive so if the first 1 breaks you can just switch it with the secound one and you lose nothing. the cost is you lose the abilty to store anything on the secound harddrive.
What you proberly want to consider is RAID 0
the one disadvantage of RAID 0 is if one harddrives crashes you lose ALL your data even if there nothing wrong with the secound harddrive.