Noob Harddrive questions

[TpLoS]

Do I need to purchase 2 HDD if I want to have a C and D drive? or can I do that with just 1 HDD? 1x 1TB HDD or 2x 500GB HDD? What is RAID and do i need it?
Thanks

 

[StrangleHold]

No you dont (need) RAID. Yes you can put 2 partitions on a single drive.

 

[johnb35]

You can partition your drive into 2 or more if you wish, creating C and D or more. Or you can use 2 separate drives. As far as raid goes, Raid 0 is called stripping where pieces of data is stored on both drives for faster access creating faster game play and decreased boot time. However in Raid 0 if one drive fails all your data is lost. Raid 1 is called mirroring in which whatever data is on drive 1 will be on drive 2 in case of drive failure. If one drive fails then you still have all your data on the second drive and its just a matter of getting another drive and hooking it up and the raid rebuilds itself. As far as you needing or wanting raid? It depends on what you want. Raid 1 has saved me a few times but I no longer run it.

 

[ganzey]

raid just splits the data up between he two, so that you get faster read and write times