Respected nerds, techs, geeks and dear fellow members

I am having presently one hard disk drive seagate of 80 GB...

I am about to buy a hard disk tommorow....

In this contect can anyone plz clarify my following doubts...

A. I have heard that we can set up two HDD with RAID connection for striping and mirroring (I dont know what these means)...

((a)) Do i need to buy the second hard disk also of size 80 GB so that i can set up RAID connection with my previous hard disk of 80 GB...???

Or is it that i can purchase 200 GB (say) of HDD tommorow and with my previous 80 GB...I can still set up RAID Connection...????????

I mean is it mandatory that both HDDs be of same size for setting up RAID connection...????

() Also to set up RAID connection is it necessary that both hard disk should be from same company....?????

Or can i have say one seagate HDD set up with say another samsung HDD in RAID...?????

(©) Can we have three hard disk drives and still set RAID connection....????

Or is it only restricted to two HDD...????

() what exactly is RAID connection and what benefits it offers....?????????

((e)) Can i still create drive image of my hard disk after setting up RAID connection......????????????????

Now as my computer and technical knowledge is very very limited (as i am a hardcore finance guy), my best and only recourse are wonderful forums like the one where i am posting right now. Its really great to have advice and suggestion of knowledgeable people here who do not have any self interest and are very helping in nature. So again I am daring to ask a few queries (infact more than few) and again hope that u people will really really help me out as u have always helped me in the past.

Thanks from deepest core of my heart for taking so much time effort and patience in READING and possibly replying...Its truly really and geniuenly appreciated....

And yes if anyone would like to add anything or say something else or suggest something better which i may be missing plz feel free to do so...

best regards

sunando

sunandoghosh at rediffmail dot com

Hi sunandoghosh,

You can learn a lot of things about RAID connections at http://search.microsoft.com/search/results...w=en-us&qu=RAID

As far as I know, there are some kits for up to 8 HD RAID on the market, for ATA and SATA... you must inform you at your dealer about it... if, as you said, you are not familiar with computers technology, I strongly recommend you to purchase and ask them to be installed by the dealer itself, as you can have a guarantee if something goes wrong afterwards.

Maybe other people here can answer your questions more deeply.

Chris

Hi Sun,

Sorry I didn't anwer sooner, I hope this will help.

First, do some heavy studying on the subject (as Ironbender suggests above) before you invest; RAID is complicated, and there are really no benefits to a personal PC owner.

Your mainboard must be able to support RAID; without that you are dead in the water. I might add, that general mainboards from most computer manufacturers are NOT RAID mainboards. So check that out first.

There are several varieties of RAID arrays, #0, 1, and 5 being the most common. RAID operates by arranging the stored data in stripes, evenly spaced across two, three or more separate harddrives. There are two major types: a setup for speed, and a setup for data retrieval in the case of one harddrive failing: you can retrieve your data off the other hardddrives. This is a popular setup in large Servers. The first one theoretically is supposed to increase the speed of data reading/writing; 1 and 5 will actually slow down your system. RAID 0 is the most popular form used in homebuild computers because most folks are interested in speed; 0 does not provide parity, or data retrieval.

In actuality, tests have shown that RAID 0 isn't substantially faster that a regular harddrive, so...? The difference may be a few milliseconds, but not enough to warrant the added cost and learning curve, and questionable results.

Unless you want the data security of Mirroring then don't bother.

As for Striping, as mentioned above, the performance benefits are negligible for most applications and you also then run the risk of total data loss if one of the two drives fails.

For adding a new drive to your system I would recommend buying the biggest you can afford, then use the software that comes with it to copy your existing disk onto the new one and replace the old one as the boot drive. Then once up and running on the new drive, you can safely wipe the old disk and use it for backup/storage.